


Music shall untune the sky

by middlemarch



Category: GLOW (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, And Lots of It, Angst, Backstory, Bilingual Character(s), F/F, F/M, Farmhouse, Father-Daughter Relationship, Female Friendship, Gen, Humor, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mother-Son Relationship, Poetry, Post Season 3, Profanity, Reading, References to Drugs, References to Illness, References to Literature, References to Shakespeare, Road Trips, Romance, Sexual Fantasy, Some Season 3 spoilers, Thanksgiving, Zombie Apocalypse, lots and lots of backstory, lots of talking, real intimacy is learning someone's middle name
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:15:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 23,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27715321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: The end came on a bright Tuesday morning. Cheap white wine was on sale and gyms were still full of resolution-makers in Spandex and Champion sweatshirts. Ruth Wilder hadn't come back to LA-- so what? What did it even matter?As it turned out, it mattered a lot. A whole fucking lot.
Relationships: Arthie Premkumar/Yolanda Rivas, Debbie Eagan & Ruth Wilder, Debbie Eagan/Mark Eagan, Justine Biagi & Sam Sylvia, Mark Eagan/Ruth Wilder, Sam Sylvia/Ruth Wilder
Comments: 118
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

Randy stopped howling after about eight hours on the I-15, once Debbie finally caved and rubbed his gums with some bourbon, the way Sam had been telling her to since about forty-five minutes in. Forty-five minutes into the trip, not the howling. He couldn’t blame the kid, he felt like screaming himself, but he couldn’t resort to the booze until it was Arthie’s turn to drive. Justine had jammed her headphones on after telling Sam to get on the I-15 and drive for eleven hours “or else.” Or else what hadn’t been specified but there was plenty to pick from for a Tuesday. It had been hairy getting out of the city—the streets were crowded, the visibility in the haphazardly packed Cadillac “less than ideal,” as Debbie had put it in the brief silence before her toddler started his blood-curdling screeching. 

“He wants his pacifier, he’s overtired,” she explained, like Sam gave a fuck. “I’ve been trying to wean him off it, I don’t have a spare with me.”

“Fucking bad timing,” Sam said. “Seems fitting today’s the day I quit smoking.”

Debbie had started making little offended sounds, huffing and muttering and Sam wished he’d been alone in his office when the alarm had gone off, or maybe with only Justine there, but this seemed about what he could expect from life.

“Don’t take it personally, Debbie. If that’s at all fucking possible,” he said, letting his lower register carry his voice over the waning cries of her spawn. Justine could not possibly have been as annoying at the same age. In the rear-view mirror, he saw Debbie’s pursed lips, the tightness in her jaw that made you aware that just underneath that pore-less skin she had a mouth full of perfect, white teeth. Christ, fucking her would be like sleeping with a machete; her douchebag ex’s pursuit of Ruth suddenly made a lot more sense. Debbie hadn’t taken off her sharply cut blazer before she got in the car, still ready for a phone-call from a studio or an agent. Like they were even on that same planet. 

“Fine,” she said and then Arthie asked her some moronic question about the baby or the show, something he blessed Arthie for asking because it meant he didn’t have to say anything else to Debbie for the next hour and a half and by then, the sound of the kid crying had melded with the vibration of the wheels on the road and the few words that cycled through his brain like the stations on Noni’s rosary: _go, now, fast, Ruth_. The radio stations were nearly all silent or static. (He’d quickly turned off the one the classic rock station that was a man’s increasingly panicked, increasingly soprano screaming.) There was no point in trying to drown anything out.

* * *

They’d stopped at his place on the way out of the city after an argument he won by announcing it was his fucking car that was their fucking ark and Noah was calling the shots. Also, he knew a half dozen ways to get to his house from the television station versus getting lost listening to Debbie give directions to her palace in Santa Monica. He’d parked the car in the garage, making sure the door was closed tight before venturing out with Justine and told her they had ten minutes to pack up her winter coat, a toothbrush, and whatever other shit would be useful. She had opened her mouth to protest he couldn’t expect her to know what that was but the clock was ticking and he was already in his bedroom before she got the words out, throwing a change of clothes and as many clean socks and briefs as he could find into a canvas duffle, along with his latest screenplay, his heaviest, least holey sweater, and a king-size bottle of aspirin. In the kitchen, he managed to find some crackers, an unopened box of shredded wheat, a couple cans of chili, a jar of olives, and a string bag of oranges; it wasn’t much but he hadn’t been planning on an emergency road-trip with three women and a toddler. He grabbed the untouched Sicilian torrone he’d meant to bring to Rosalie’s and shoved it in the grocery bag along with all the remaining bottles of liquor (which seemed sadly few given what was ahead of them.) Justine came into the kitchen with two minutes to spare, her bulging backpack over her shoulder, a flashlight in one hand and the baseball bat he kept by the front door in the other. In the last thirty seconds, he had a brainstorm.

“I’ll grab the axe,” Sam said. “Get the afghan off the sofa and whatever spare blankets you can find.”

“We have an axe?” Justine exclaimed, but she was muffled by the godawful crocheted granny squares in mustard and rust that had graced his couch for about twenty years. If Randy threw up on it, it couldn’t look any worse. At least, Sam thought that was true and that they’d probably be finding out for sure around hour sixteen.

He was only off by an hour. Waste of a fucking orange.

* * *

Arthie almost hadn’t come along. She’d made a bunch of noise about needing to find Yolanda, while Debbie had been leaving messages for Mark, her mother, Bash, and Cherry, Randy scuttling around like a crab under foot, until Sam had interrupted her.

“Yo’s a big girl and this is a goddamn fucking apocalypse, so either get the hell out and find her or shut up and see if there’s anything you want from your locker or anyone else’s—you have five minutes. And not for nothing, but I think your chances are shit if you try to find her yourself.” He added a shrug for good measure. She was a bright woman and it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to have someone in the car who had some medical training but he wasn’t going to fucking beg.

“I guess you’re right,” she said. “I just—I didn’t think something like this could happen.”

“You’ve got a lot of company—way I see it, we have about an hour to get the jump on everyone getting the fuck out of LA. After that, we’ll be stuck here and then we’re screwed and I don’t have enough bourbon or blow to deal with that scenario,” he said. It’d make a hell of a short film, but who’d be around to watch it? Arthie’s dark eyes widened, like she was actually letting herself imagine it, and he felt something catch in his throat.

“Leave her a note on the door. If she’s looking for you, she’ll come here at some point,” he said. "And tell me you can drive stick without stripping the brakes.” Like they’d be hitting the brakes once they were on the freeway. All they had going for them was speed and the fact that he’d spent his career getting cozy with monsters—and then taking them apart.

Somehow that was enough—not one of the women asked where they were going. Randy just fucking stared. Little bastard had probably already guessed.


	2. Chapter 2

Justine guessed first but then, she was sitting in the front seat.

“Gas is going to be a problem, isn’t it?”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say _No shit, Sherlock_ but she was his daughter and she was seventeen years old and he realized he wanted to protect her from whatever was coming. He’d heard all his fucking life it was the thought that counted and he finally wished it was true.

“Yeah. Wasn’t safe enough to fill up the gas can in LA though,” he said. “Assuming I could have found it.”

“You think it’ll be better further out?” she said.

“Hope so. Probably going to be a matter of luck,” he said. 

“Maybe if we find some gas station in the boonies, not like one with a QuikMart, just one of those creepy ones that looks halfway abandoned where you expect some off-key country music to be coming from nowhere,” she said, conjuring a scene without even trying. Goddamn it, she was talented. 

“We’ll have to take our chances. One tank of gas isn’t going to get us where we need to go,” he said. “If we can fill up, we should try to drive through the night.”

“What, you don’t feel great about being alone in the middle of nowhere with three women and a baby, trying to get a little shut-eye?” Justine said, smirking a little.

“You forgot the fucking axe,” he countered. If she could try for something like their regular conversations, so could he.

“No way did I forget the axe, Sam,” she said. “I just think Debbie would do a better job using it.”

“What’s that?” Debbie said. Christ, she was like a fucking laser when it came to anything related to herself and her job. 

“Never mind,” Sam said. “We’re just talking about my new screenplay.” This got a full-on eye-roll from Justine, but Sam knew Debbie had zero interest in his actual creative work. 

“At a time like this?”

“Yeah. I’m the driver, I get to pick what I want to fucking talk about, Debbie.”

* * *

“I’m home,” Sam called out, dumping his leather jacket on the chair and his keys in the little pottery dish Carmen had had sent in roughly twelve miles of bubble-wrap to ensure its safe arrival. Something, multiple somethings actually, smelled wonderful but it was the onions and sausage he noticed first. That made him smile.

“You took my advice,” he said, walking over to the kitchen that was flooded with late afternoon light, a saturated gold that made Ruth’s dark hair chestnut and auburn, like some autumn leaf. She didn’t answer right away, intent on her work, not shooing him away when he came to stand right behind her. She’d put on the blue gingham apron Justine had given her as a gag gift and tied a perky bow at the small of her back, a bow whose tails positively fucking begged for Sam to pull them loose. He resisted, for the moment. “What, no snappy response? Where’s my fucking repartee, Ruth?”

“I’m busy,” she said, carefully removing the pan from the oven. The turkey weighed at least eighteen pounds because fifteen was the average and Ruth was determined to impress everyone. He could see the way she tensed her shoulders, the strain in her arms; he knew she had a decent hold on the bird and put his hands on her slender waist.

“Sam—”

“What?” He leaned forward, let his lips graze the nape of her neck, the side of her throat. She smelled of almonds, of irises, neroli, bergamot, not any perfume but the remnant of the one she liked best and her warm skin.

“Don’t make me drop the turkey,” she said and he kissed her, his hands tightening on her waist. She made a sound like a sigh.

“Never gonna happen,” he said. “You smell good.”

“I smell like sautéed onion and garlic and turkey gizzard,” she said, lifting the pan onto the stove-top and setting it down; the weight released, she let herself settle back into him and he brought his hips closer to hers, wanting her to know how hard he was.

“Like I said, you smell fucking good.” She laughed and he felt it, her back against his chest, her ass against his cock; he felt her arch her neck and turn to catch his eye with her own. So blue, clear and dark and lovely, like the sky over the desert.

“You’re just happy I made the stuffing the way you like after all those arguments,” she said. The laminate counters were crowded with Pyrex dishes of mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole with that horrific toupee of fried onions she’d insisted on, a tray full of peppers and onions and garlic, three, no, four pies-- enough food for a fucking commune, when Melrose and Jenny hadn’t even confirmed they were coming, Tammé had sent her regrets, Cherry and Keith were eating with his mother first and Justine said to expect her to be late. Very late.

“I am. I’m going to be eating it for a fucking week, you made so much,” he said, moving his lips against the delicate skin beneath her ear. “And those pies, you even made me torta di ricotta…”

“There’s supposed to be too much,” she said, her voice low. Undramatic. Shit, when she stopped acting, she stopped him dead in his tracks. “An abundance, more than you expected, more than you deserve.” She let that last _s_ linger.

“Fucking Squanto—” he began, feeling her twist in his arms, Ruth eager, lithe, beautiful, the look in her eyes, the anticipation in her parted lips…

… And there was a rough sound, like something torn, destroyed, and then the unmistakable smell of piss. Sam moved suddenly, his forehead smacking against the window, his glasses rattling against the bridge of his nose. Everything was blurry for a minute, until he settled the glasses back on his face, just in time to see Debbie fumbling with the tabs on the sides of Randy’s diaper. If there had been a diaper pin handy, Sam would have stabbed someone with it.

“Had a nice nap?” Debbie asked.

“Why?” he snapped. He never woke up well from a nap, even worse from a dream as torturous as the one he’d just had. He’d had some version of it nearly every night since he left Ruth on the sidewalk.

“You were muttering something about pie,” she said, finishing up with Randy, who was lying there like a drugged-out pasha, silent but wide-eyed, almost making Sam miss the kid’s screaming. “You sounded like you didn’t want to wake up.”

“Who would?” he said, slumping, looking out the window at the road. Empty for now, which meant safe.

* * *

“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall—”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Sam said. “No. Fuck no.”

“It was just a suggestion,” Justine said, her attempt at innocence dashed by the dark gleam in her eyes he made out in the rear-view mirror.

“You know, to pass the time on a long car trip,” Arthie piped up.

“This a fucking joke to you?” Sam said. They’d taken a very brief break to get gas, mercifully totally alone, and for everyone who wasn’t Randy to pee, then they’d gotten back on the road. Sam’s shoulders were killing him and there was no way he’d ever eat another olive in his fucking life, though as threats to the universe went, it was a piss-poor one given the situation. And now they wanted to play games?

“Twenty Questions?” That was Debbie. “Animal, mineral or vegetable. Nothing dirty.”

“I don’t want to know what you think is bigger than a fucking breadbox,” Sam said.

“License plates?” Arthie offered. 

“If we see a lot, we’re screwed,” Justine pointed out. “And if we don’t, there’s no game.”

“I like that part. No game,” Sam said. “Silence. Think your own fucking thoughts. Contemplate the universe.”

“You’re being a curmudgeon,” Justine said, clearly relishing the word. 

“A grouch,” Arthie agreed. He could see her nodding out of the corner of his eye since she was currently riding shotgun. Driving tired him out but it was worse being a passenger. Ruth made the aforementioned contemplation impossible for him. Impossible and excruciating, his imagination eagerly serving up visions of Ruth talking about how their current situation reminded her of Shakespeare during the plague and the role of the Fool in Lear, Ruth tilting her head to one side and giving him her patented cheer-up-Sam look or patting his fucking knee and just leaving her hand there, warm on his thigh, claiming him. If Ruth had said it, she’d have clarified he was entitled to be a grouch but wouldn’t it be even better to be a visionary? Fuck his imagination.

“I’d go with killjoy,” Debbie said. Three against one with Randy abstaining via his latest bourbon-infused nap. A defeat.

“One round of the fucking highway sign alphabet game,” he said. The tension in his shoulders was climbing up his neck, into his jaw. “One. Justine, give me some aspirin.”

“There’s not much to take it with,” she said, rifling around in the bag of groceries. “I should have grabbed that Orangina.”

“S’fine. I don’t need water,” he said. The pills would be bitter but that was something familiar, bitterness. He could use that. If they drove all this way, all the way that was left, and she wasn’t there…

“A, Alda!” Debbie called out. 

“Justine, if you’re going to play, I expect you to fucking win,” he said. “Don’t shame your family.”


	3. Chapter 3

They’d gotten lost the last hour and a half. Debbie wasn’t quite as sure about the address as she had been in LA and they weren’t going to Omaha, when all was said and done; Ruth had asked to have her checks sent to some random town in Nebraska. “Town” in name only, a one block main street and the house itself far enough out to be in the country. Debbie said it was where her grandparents had the family farm and at least Ruth hadn’t given the station a PO Box because then they’d have no idea where to go. It was true and Sam had to pay more attention to the driving, so he didn’t argue with her, but he still wondered what the fuck Debbie had said that made Ruth decide to retreat so definitively, not just to her parents’ place in a nice part of the city with leafy trees and manicured yards. He ignored the possibility that their last encounter ( _Ruth’s mouth so sweet, so hot, her hands on him and that breath she’d taken when he touched her first, her eyes when he’d told her, that clear moment of being terribly hurt when she least expected it before her pride kicked in and her affront, the urge to make a wild promise he’d tasted, swallowed back_ ) was the reason for her exeunt. Unchased and unchaste. If he’d said that to her, she would have laughed in surprise, in appreciation. He could have called her the next day or the day after but he hadn’t and then it had seemed like too many days, too many hours had passed; then he had started dreaming about her and he couldn’t bring himself to pick up the phone and say her name into it after spending the night with this other version of her, one he never disappointed.

“This it?” he said, as he parked the Cadillac in front of a shabby looking outbuilding that was too square to be a barn. He guessed it was the garage but maybe it just housed old machinery or stood empty, existing simply to annoy the wind. 

“I think so,” Debbie said. “It says 306 on the mailbox and Ruth told me once there was a sycamore in front of her grandmother’s house.” Even in a Nebraska winter with every leaf stripped from every tree, the sycamore’s bark was still obviously dappled enough that Debbie, no botanist, could identify it. It wasn’t a lot to go on but it was what they had.

“Okay. You all stay put. If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, drive away. You hear me? Drive the fuck away, as fast as you can,” Sam said.

“Sam—” Justine interrupted. “That’s not—you can’t expect us to—"

“I’m not arguing, Justine. I’m fucking telling you,” he said. “Debbie?”

“Yeah, Sam. Fifteen minutes,” she said. Arthie just looked at him with those big dark eyes and he could see she wasn’t going to say a word. 

“Lock the door behind me,” he said to his daughter instead of _Goodbye_ or _I love you_. He’d parked far enough away they had a clear path out if it all went to shit and he let the cold winter sun blind him for a minute before he started walking over to the white clapboard house. His arms swung free—he wasn’t holding onto the steering wheel for the first time in hours and he’d left everything that passed as a weapon with the women. The ground was hard underfoot, frozen, but with only a few lingering crusts of snow around the base of the sycamore and the bare shrubs next to the steps of the front door. He climbed them and stood before the front door. It was a big old slab of oak, the work of a different generation, hand-planed and unadorned. There was no door-bell, no cast-metal door knocker. He made a fist and hit the door once, twice, then took the doorknob in his hand and started to turn it when it abruptly opened in.

Ruth was standing within arm’s reach, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, wearing a heavy navy sweater under a worn pair of oversized denim overalls she’d cinched with a man’s thick leather belt, the tips of sturdy work-boots just visible. Nothing fit her and she looked entirely natural. Beautiful. Unlike Sam, her hands weren’t empty—she had a Remington 870 shotgun pointed square at his face, the trigger cocked.

“Fuck, Ruth. Nice to see you too,” he said. He’d never been so relieved to be threatened with murder. Ruth looked like she’d seen a fucking ghost. He took a chance, rubbed the back of his neck, then shoved his hands in his pockets. Christ, he wanted to kiss her. Wanted her.

“Sam—”

“I promise you, I’m not a fucking zombie. Can I come in or are you going to blow my brains out?”


	4. Chapter 4

“Lock the door,” Ruth ordered as firmly as she ever had when she was Zoya, but without any hint of the Russian accent. She still had the gun pointed at him so he didn’t dawdle.

“Done. Seriously, Ruth, you planning on killing me? Torture? This going to turn into some fucking bizarre hostage scenario?” he said. He’d imagined seeing her again, of being shouted at or embraced or Ruth bursting into tears, but he hadn’t banked on an extended scene where she held him off like an intruder, while letting him into her home. Something in the tone of his voice got through to her and she uncocked the trigger and set the gun down, leaning it against a table. Once her hands were free, she didn’t seem to know what to do with them.

“Sorry. You startled me,” she said.

“Yeah, I can see that.” Though she didn’t look startled as much as guarded and her Sam Shepherd serious farmer get-up just underscored it.

“Why didn’t you knock? Or, I don’t know, call out, ask to come in?” she said.

“You’re upset about my fucking manners?” he said.

“Zombies don’t knock, Sam. I thought you were a monster,” she said. He looked around. The house seemed empty. There was no older woman walking in from the kitchen, wiping her hands with a dishtowel, no man’s voice calling out _Ruthie, you okay?_ from the upstairs. Where were her fucking parents? Shouldn’t there be some faithful Lassie knock-off barking like a hellhound to defend Ruth’s honor? How long had she been alone? 

“I’m not a monster, Ruth,” he said. He let the words hang there in the air, hoped she heard everything he meant, but for once, it was hard for him to read the expression in her blue eyes. She was very still, giving away nothing. “Should’ve called, but I didn’t have your number. Here.”

“You came all this way, not sure if I was here, if this was even the right place?” she asked. She was taking it as some huge fucking romantic gesture, some chivalric quest shit probably, and in his heart of hearts, he couldn’t say she was wrong, that somehow, in some fucking way, he’d been convinced she’d have felt it, must have known he was trying to find her.

“I’ve done crazier shit in my life,” he said, shrugging. “But yeah.” The urge to hold her was getting impossible to control, but with their fucked-up history… “Ruth, can I—”

He didn’t get to finish because she moved suddenly, with the same grace she showed in the ring, hurling herself into his arms. When had a woman every held him so tightly? He could feel her body through the bulky clothes, he remembered it from Justine’s formal, which seemed like it had happened a lifetime ago—and yesterday. Ruth pressed her face against the side of his neck, breathless as if she’d run a mile to get there; he was dizzy with the scent of her skin, her tears wet on his throat. Having her close, keeping her close, was everything, even though there was a lot of shit they had to sort out—he had to hand it to the zombies, for non-verbal, groaning brain-gobblers, they had quite a way of putting things in perspective. Ruth shifted slightly and he felt her hand reach up to touch his hair, grazing his temple, his cheekbone, her fingers very gentle and deliberate.

“Ruth, I lo—”

“Sam! Sam! We’re coming!” was accompanied by a fucking barrage of knocking. 

Ruth pulled away, opening the door. Justine and Arthie stood there, mouths still wide open from shouting; Justine held the axe across her chest and Arthie had the bat raised up, a decent stance for bashing a zombie’s head in like a fucking squash.

“Oh my God!” Ruth exclaimed.

“Where’s Debbie?” Sam asked. “And why the fuck are you here?”

“It’s been fifteen minutes, Sam,” Justine said. “Hi, Ruth.”

* * *

“I thought this would be best for you and Randy,” Ruth said. The room was as bright as it could be on a winter afternoon and the light made the colors on the patchwork quilt more vivid; the bottom left corner was made from her mother’s favorite Sunday dress when she was nine, blue sprinkled liberally with buttercups. “It’s my parents’ room but we’ll figure something out if they get here.” It hurt to say _if_ but she had to admit the possibility.

“When they get here,” Debbie said, as if Ruth could ensure their safe arrival by simply bucking up and smiling through.

“Don’t,” Ruth said.

“Don’t what? You can’t lose hope, not now,” Debbie said.

“You don’t know how I feel, what I need to get through the day,” Ruth said. “Through the night.”

“You don’t have any reason to give up—”

“Debbie, neither of us knows what’s going to happen next. But you also don’t know my parents. You had lunch with them once, maybe twice, over the past five years. They were supposed to be here days ago, they knew exactly where they were going and what they were going to do. And they’re not here,” Ruth said.

“This is making you feel better? This…wallowing?” Debbie said.

“I’m not trying to feel better. I’m just trying to be realistic, to deal with what we’ve got,” Ruth said, taking a deep breath. “This isn’t GLOW or Eden, you can’t make things go the way you want through sheer strength of will.”

“I’m not doing that,” Debbie argued.

“Yeah, you are. It worked for you before. But it’s not going to work here. Now,” Ruth said. “I’m sorry there isn’t a crib for Randy. I can get some extra blankets and pillows though, you could make a sort of nest for him.”

“I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, Ruth. I’m trying to help you,” Debbie said.

“I know. But I’m telling you, I’m coping. My own way. It’s not a failure simply because I’m making the choices,” Ruth said, feeling how true the words were, how right. Ruth could see how Debbie wanted to push back, she could almost hear what she was going to say, something about how Ruth had run away from LA, how she hadn’t called, her track record wasn’t exactly stellar… and then she saw Debbie look out the window, walk over to pull back the faded yellow curtain. Ruth remembered her grandmother making those curtains, the steady, warm sound of the sewing machine, the rich buttercup color of the fabric draped over her grandmother’s lap.

“You can see for miles. It’s so empty, such a difference from LA,” Debbie said. “Did you miss it?”

“Sometimes. And it’s nice to be in a place where everyone didn’t thinking leaving LA was a terrible idea. Everyone here told me I was smart to come back, well before the zombies,” Ruth said. “That felt good.”

“You didn’t think it was a good idea though,” Debbie said, acute the way she could be; it wasn’t a criticism and it wasn’t encouragement. It was what had made her be such a good friend.

“No, but I still liked hearing it. Considering whether it was true,” Ruth said. “I’ll look in the attic and see whether there are any old toys for Randy. My grandmother kept a lot of stuff.”

“He could do with something besides Sam’s baseball bat,” Debbie said. “If you find anything.”

* * *

“Zombies don’t drive,” Sam said. They were sitting at the kitchen table while Debbie gave Randy a bath and Justine and Arthie were in the old front parlor, playing cards. Sam still had the dishtowel he’d used to dry slung over his shoulder. 

“They don’t sneak up on you,” Ruth said.

“Zombies can’t carry a tune,” Sam said.

“You’re sure about that one?” Ruth asked. “What if someone had perfect pitch before? What if Kiri Te Kawana were got turned into a zombie?” Sam laughed, the way he had laughed before, except Ruth was aware she was already thinking about it as Before. Before, when she was devastated not to be cast in Justine’s film, when she worried about her career, paying the rent, whether Sheila was going to be a huge success and she was going to be stuck in Nebraska, subbing at her father’s high school, wearing hand-knit cardigans given to her by her mother unironically, getting used to Scotch, its burn and the ashes. 

“Kiri Te Kawana? Jesus Christ, Ruth, you’re killing me. How long have you listened to their fucking moaning? LA got to be a shitshow before we got out,” Sam said. He took a swig from his mug like it was whiskey but she knew it was just Lipton she’d steeped until it was nearly black.

“Fine, you’re the expert,” she said.

“Zombies don’t eat their vegetables,” Sam said. “But they don’t do blow either. Or shoot up.”

“So, that’s kind of a draw,” she said.

“Zombies don’t discriminate,” Sam said. “They’re equal opportunity biters. Probably save HR a bundle in lawsuits.”

“Is this too mean?” Ruth asked. “Are we not taking this seriously enough?”

“Ruth, you take everything seriously. We’re living through the end times. We’re allowed to make a fucking joke if that’s what it takes to stay sane,” Sam said.

“You think these are the End Times? That none of us will make it?” she asked, unable to keep the words light, provocative. She wanted to curl up next to him on the sofa and feel him stroke her hair. Barring that, she wanted an argument, she wanted to see that light in his eyes.

“The fuck if I know,” Sam said. “It’s bad, but it’s been bad before. There’ve been plagues before. This one seems pretty fucking bad though.”

“Shakespeare wrote Lear during the plague,” Ruth said. He smiled at her then, almost as if he was proud of her.

“My screenplay’s no fucking Lear and you’re not Cordelia,” Sam said. “Not Regan either. Or Lady MacBeth. And you can close your mouth, I’m not a fucking cave-dweller.”

“Who am I then?” she asked. 

“You’re a fucking pain in my ass,” he smiled. “You want me to say Miranda. Or Rosalind. You’re Ruth, _cuore mio._ ”

“What?”

“My heart. And if you ever tell anyone I said this, I’ll deny it,” he said.


	5. Chapter 5

“Is there anything you people won’t pickle?” Sam asked.

“They’re not all pickles. Some of them are just canned and my mother and grandmother made a lot of jam and preserves. The blackberry is especially good, it usually wins the blue ribbon,” Ruth said, trying to see the cellar through Sam’s eyes. She was so familiar with the rows and rows of jars, the handwritten labels, the musty scent of earth, of years of bushels of potatoes and turnips stored in burlap sacks. She’d pretended it was Aladdin’s cave when she was a little girl, draping herself with a silk scarf, rubbing the bellies of the jars in hopes a genie would appear.

“It’s like the fucking Mutter Museum for, what is that—turnips?” he said.

“No one pickles turnips—they keep on their own. Those are watermelon rind pickles. And given what’s going on, I think we’ll be glad enough of them pretty soon,” Ruth said. “No offense, but you didn’t bring much with you to feed five people. Maybe to get drunk.”

“Randy doesn’t eat much but point taken. You have an idea of what’s down here?”

“You mean an inventory?” Ruth said.

“Yeah. An inventory,” Sam said, smiling at her. It was dim in the cellar but it was easy to see his happiness if you had made of study of it, which she had.

“Not specifically, but it wouldn’t be terribly hard,” she said.

“Maybe you’d need some help though?” he said. He moved closer to her, not touching her but close enough. 

“Yeah, some help would be good.” She shuffled over, just a little, bumping his shoulder with hers.

“Anyone could walk in, Ruth,” he said. It was a warning, one she was sure she was meant to disregard.

“Not anyone,” she said. “Your daughter. My ex-best friend and your colleague.”

“You’re not worried about Arthie?” Sam said.

“I think she’s on our side,” Ruth said. “Justine too, but she doesn’t want to see anything. You’re her dad, she doesn’t want to think of you that way—”

“Jesus Christ, Ruth—”

“It’s good, though, isn’t it? It means she thinks of you as her father. It means you’re doing it right,” Ruth said.

“Am I?” he asked, reaching up a hand to stroke her cheek with his thumb. When he looked at her like that, she could hardly breathe and she thought he knew it, liked it.

“Sam—”

“I’m sorry it’s like this,” he said, brushing his lips against hers. 

“I’m not,” Ruth said. “But I also think you’re going to have a particular fondness for apple butter and pickled eggs soon enough.”

“Apple butter sounds good. What would I spread it on?” he asked, laughing when she flushed and then stared at him as boldly she dared. It would be nothing for Zoya. It was everything for Ruth. “Fuck me, that worked.”

“Sam!” Justine’s voice rang out. If Randy had been napping, minus liquor, she would have woken him.

“Goddammit!” Sam’s hand dropped from her face but Ruth caught it in hers.

“It’s okay. Maybe later,” she said.

“Later? Who’s fucking waiting for later?” he asked, pulling her hand to his lips and kissing her palm, the touch of his lips, his moustache a shock, a promise. Carnal. Adoring. “Who’d take those odds?”

* * *

“We can’t go on like this,” Sam said. He was met with silence, which was pretty much what he expected, since they’d been avoiding talking about the situation.

“I don’t know,” Ruth began.

“I haven’t been completely honest with you,” Sam said, watching her expression change. Anyone could see it in her mouth but he caught the look in her eyes. He’d been hoping to bury the lead and just talk about the need for supplies but Ruth looked terrified. “Fuck, no—it’s not what you think.”

“What then?”

“Yeah, Sam, what?” Justine said. Christ, she looked just like his mother then. Debbie and Arthie stayed quiet, sensing there was some family drama playing out. Maybe hoping that was all it was.

“A while ago, couple months now, I had a heart attack,” he said. “I’m on some meds and what I brought with me from LA, they’ve almost run out.”

“A heart attack—” Ruth exclaimed.

“What the fuck, when?” Justine cried.

“The day your screenplay got picked up by the studio,” Sam said. Debbie whistled, an impressive skill they could have used on GLOW if she’d ever bothered to tell someone she could do it so fucking piercingly.

“Is this why you brought me along?” Arthie said. 

“Holy shit, Arthie, you flunked out of med school. If I’d wanted a real cardiologist, I’d have swung by Cedars on our way out and grabbed one. I asked you to come because I thought you’d get attacked within five seconds of leaving the station,” Sam said.

“Are you okay?” Ruth asked. Of course she was the one to ask the question but he knew it meant something different to her than the others. It meant something different to him too.

“I’m okay. As far as I know. There’s some permanent damage, but before all this shit happened, the doctor said as long as I followed the diet, laid off drugs and alcohol, did some exercise and took my meds, I didn’t have anything special to worry about. He called it being compliant, which yeah, that’s not my strong suit, but I was managing,” he said.

“And now?” Justine asked.

“Feels the same to me, but I can’t fucking quantify the impact of an apocalypse. Neither could the cardiologist, Harvard Medical School be damned. But seems like I should try to stay on the meds if I can, so I need to get to a pharmacy and see what I can find,” he said.

“You’re not going alone,” Ruth said. “It’s not safe.”

“I’ll go with you,” Justine said.

“Like hell you will,” Sam said.

“I’ll go,” Ruth said. “It makes sense, I know where everything is and if there’s anyone…not infected at the pharmacy, they’ll know me. They’d give me the meds, not you. Debbie has to stay here with Randy and Arthie can make a list for us, for other medicine we could get if they don’t have yours.”

“Ruth—” Sam didn’t really have anything to say, except he didn’t want her to come and he did. 

“Besides, you need me to drive,” Ruth said.

“I’m not going to drop dead at the wheel, Ruth,” he said.

“We’re not taking your Cadillac, Sam. I’m driving the pick-up. It’s from the late 50s, it’s a little temperamental,” Ruth said.

“There’s a truck here?” Debbie asked. “Where?”

“In the barn. How do you think I got here?” Ruth said. “I came in the truck and my parents took my mother’s station wagon to pick up supplies.”

“We actually need more supplies now,” Arthie said. “As long as you’re going out.”

“This isn’t a fucking burger run, Arthie,” Sam snapped. “We’re trying to stay under the fucking radar.”

“She’s right,” Debbie said. “I know there’s a lot of canned stuff in the cellar, but we need other staples like rice, pasta, peanut butter, tuna—”

“And whatever we can use to heat the house, the woodpile’s going fast,” Justine said.

“How about a goddamn fucking pony? Magic beans? What part of this don’t you understand? The longer we’re out there, the greater chance of getting infected. Attacked. Killed—or worse,” Sam said, raising his voice.

“They’re right, Sam,” Ruth said. “But we have to start with your medicine. There’s a pharmacy in town, we don’t have to go all the way into Omaha or Gretna. It’s always been pretty quiet out here, maybe we won’t see anyone.”

“Fine. We’re bringing your gun though,” Sam said.

“Can you hit anything with it?” Ruth said. Justine laughed and Debbie and Arthie smiled.

“Let’s hope you don’t have to find out,” he said.

* * *

“Fuck. You were the real Liberty Belle the whole time,” Sam said. Ruth was sitting in the driver’s seat of the rusty old pick-up, one hand lightly on the steering wheel and the other leaning on the rolled down window. She was back in her overalls and now had a buffalo plaid coat and a knit cap covering her dark hair. She hadn’t put it in pigtails, which he appreciated deeply, since they were too easy for a zombie to grab and also reminded him of his childhood as well as hers and there was enough between them without adding in any other shit.

“The real Liberty Belle probably would have smelled of manure in this get-up,” Ruth said. “Get in.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, to make her smile. It worked. It was good to know that he hadn’t lost his touch. He climbed into the truck, settling the shotgun within easy reach. She rolled up her window and turned to face him, her usual earnest expression completely arresting.

“So, it should take us about fifteen minutes to get there, I’m planning to take back roads that hardly anyone ever uses—”

“Ruth, just—hang on a minute,” he said. He’d suddenly been reminded of all the times they’d been together in his car, that sense of intimacy she could effortlessly create with a glance, and of the last time when he’d driven away from her, leaving her crying, angry and vulnerable on the fucking sidewalk and then the long trip to get to her, hoping she would be there. Fucking terrified of what it would mean if she weren’t.

“Just—we’re alone, we’re alone now, finally, and fuck, I want—” he said, breaking off as he lifted a hand to her cheek, leaning towards her. “Okay?” She nodded very slightly, enough for him to feel it in his palm before he even registered seeing it. He closed the distance, kissing her softly at first and then with an intensity that had nothing soft about it, his tongue in her mouth, his hand at the back of her neck, hers stroking the stubble of his unshaven cheek. She tasted sweet, heady—he was dazed with his desire for her, how it kept ratcheting higher and higher with every small movement she made; she sucked on his lower lip and he gasped, would have pulled her onto his lap except for the gear shaft between them. He shifted, kissing her throat, feeling the vibration of her moan against his open mouth, the sound naked, undisguised. Ruth, without the least pretense. The last time he’d kissed her had been light, joyful; this time, there was darkness, fear and guilt, mixed so thoroughly with his love for her, his need for her there was no way to separate the one from the others. Her eyes, when he broke away for a moment, were an impossible color, the blue of very early morning when you were first able to distinguish hue from shadow. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “So fucking sorry—”

“Why?” She looked more startled by his apology than she had by his embrace, though he would have guessed she’d wanted it just as much.

“When I said I loved you before, I thought I meant it. I thought I fucking knew what it meant,” he said. “I drove away, I wouldn’t wait—”

“Are you sorry you came here?” she asked. How was she so goddamn luminous when the whole world was winter, grey and umber, death and the undead stalking them? She was dressed like her fucking grandfather and all he wanted to do was lay her down on the front seat and make love to her, whispering in her ear the whole time things filthy enough to make her blush, tender enough to make her believe him when he came saying her name _Ruth my Ruth Christ I love you_.

“No. Fuck no,” he said.

“Before, all those things I worried about, suffered over, so many of them don’t mean anything now. You do,” she said, stroking a finger through the grey hair at his temples. “I don’t mean they didn’t mean anything then, but we’re not living that life anymore. Maybe never again.”

“I wanted you to have the part,” he said. “What happened was a bad call, handled like shit.”

“Oh, Sam, you don’t have to say that,” she said.

“I know I don’t have to. It’s the fucking truth and that’s still important,” he said, bending towards her again to kiss her, more leisurely this time, luxuriating in the caress, canting himself awkwardly to get his arm around her. To feel her through the heavy jacket and rough denim, her smooth, warm skin, the curve of her breasts, the hidden loveliness of her slender waist. “It matters. It matters that you know what I saw in you. What I see.”

“No secrets, then. Not anymore,” she said, putting her hand over his beating heart. 

“Fine. Don’t expect me to hit anything with that fucking shotgun, unless I’m using it as a bludgeon,” he said, grinning. “If it’s not a camera, I can’t shoot worth a damn.”

“That wasn’t a secret,” she said. “But I’d love to read your new screenplay.” He laughed as she started the truck, as they drove off into the dangerous, unknowable world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Mütter Museum is a medical museum located in the Center City area of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It contains a collection of anatomical and pathological specimens, wax models, and antique medical equipment. The museum is part of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The original purpose of the collection, donated by Dr. Thomas Dent Mutter in 1858, was for biomedical research and education.


	6. Chapter 6

Watching Ruth peer into what was pretty clearly an abandoned building, her pretty mouth pursed and her blue eyes all squinted up against the gloom, and then jiggle the door handle like she was defusing a fucking bomb would have been frankly hilarious if they weren’t both at risk of being murdered or turned into the walking dead in the interim.

“Uh, Ruth, want to get a fucking move on?” Sam said.

“Mr. Boyd?” Ruth called out, ignoring him or at least acting like she was. “You there? It’s Ruth Wilder, Bert and Gretchen’s girl, and my…friend Sam. Sam Sylvia. Can we come in?”

“Seriously? We’re doing introductions?” Sam said. He was feeling generous enough not to comment on the long pause before she’d decided to refer to him as her friend, whatever the hell that meant. Later, assuming there was a later, he’d return to it, as well as the way she identified herself as Gretchen and Bert’s ‘girl’ when she was thirty.

“It’s two seconds and it’s polite. Mr. Boyd sets a big store on manners. Everyone here does,” Ruth said. “If he’s there, we’re going to be asking for a pretty big favor. And if he’s not, we’re going to be stealing.”

“Don’t tell me you are planning to leave an IOU. ‘Dear Mr. Boyd, I took a ninety-day supply of Lopressor, three cans of kerosene, a dozen rolls of toilet paper and two Hershey bars. I promise I’ll pay you back when the apocalypse ends. Sincerely, Ruth Wilder,’” Sam said, using a sing-songy voice far too high-pitched to sound much like Ruth. “In and out, we said driving here. You have the shotgun and I’m the look-out.”

“Stop criticizing me—you’re not a goddamn authority on the zombie apocalypse,” Ruth said with some asperity. 

“As the person here who’s made over a half-dozen horror movies and the one who, as you’ve pointed out before, has been knocking around a hell of a lot longer, I think I am the authority,” Sam said, grabbing the butt of the shotgun and using it to break through the glass window on the door, then reaching inside to open it. The threshold was littered with shards of glass but they’d mostly fallen close to the door and were easy enough to step over.

“Sam!”

“Add it to the fucking IOU, Ruth. Come on, we have to get to the pharmacy.” The front of the drugstore mostly looked dusty with some of the shelves more bare than others, but nothing indicative of any vandals or ransacking scavengers. The latter was what they technically were, but though he hadn’t met the man, Sam felt sure Mr. Boyd wouldn’t mind much. And if he did, fuck him. Sam grabbed some rubbing alcohol and gauze as they walked towards the back, shoving them in the sturdy plastic bag emblazoned with Boyd’s Drugstore in a font popular in 1932, which was also when the place was established, based on the logo. He tucked in a box of condoms more surreptitiously—yeah, they hadn’t slept together yet, but it looked likely and he wasn’t planning on another one of these trips in the near-future. Or an apocalypse baby. He put in a bottle of antacids and a tub of Vaseline so the condoms weren’t so fucking...obvious.

“Here,” Ruth said, opening the door to the pharmacy. They’d made enough noise she didn’t call out again, but she was still cautious walking in. “Arthie said anything that ends with ‘olol’ is okay, if we can’t find your regular medicine easily.”

“This place is a fucking maze,” Sam muttered.

“It’s okay—it’s for your blood pressure, so it’ll be with the other heart medicine. Over here,” Ruth said, making her way to a shelf that looked exactly like every other shelf. At least the boxes and pill bottles were neatly stacked.

“What, you’re psychic now?”

“No, I just worked here for a summer. When I was fourteen. I know how Mr. Boyd arranges the medicine. And here’s what you’re taking, right?” she said, holding out a box labelled metoprolol. “There’s not a lot in here but we can take all of it and the other ones on next to it.” She gestured for him to hold the bag open so she could drop the box in and he, insistently heretic son of the Church who’d been too lazy to become fully ex-communicate, prayed with all his sinning little heart she wouldn’t see the condoms.

“Let’s get antibiotics. Penicillin and maybe there’s some other stuff, Arthie said Bactrim,” Ruth said, dumping chunky bottles into the rapidly filling bag. “And some of these,” she added, picking up what were clearly seashell inspired packs of birth control pills in pastel plastic as if women needed crap to be pink in order to buy it.

“That’s a shitload of birth control. You can relax, I’m not that fucking potent, Ruth,” he said.

“It’s for Debbie,” she said simply, as if that explained anything. He must have looked fucking confused, because she started talking again. “She has really bad cramps, heavy periods, and she needs the pill to keep it under control.”

“I needed to know that?” he said. “Isn’t that personal?”

“There are five of us living in a four bedroom, one bath farmhouse. Nothing’s that personal right now,” Ruth said. “I know you—if we don’t get every one of these,” waving a lilac clamshell in his face while holding onto the shotgun almost casually, “You’re going to run out in search of a zombie to get bitten by, screaming ‘you haven’t been undead until you’ve had a Sicilian.’”

“Fuck, Ruth, you’re doing stand-up now?” He’d heard worse honestly, but he wasn’t about to say so at this fucking juncture.

“Aren’t you always telling me to relax?” she said.

“Jesus, I didn’t mean now,” he said, though it did seem like they weren’t in any immediate danger and he didn’t exactly mind hearing that she listened to him.

“Plus, we’re done. We can get some candy bars on the way out and then head home,” she said. “I actually like Oh Henry!s the best, not Hershey’s.”

“No, we can’t,” he said. “We need to get some pain-killers.”

“You got more aspirin,” she said. “Plus what you brought from LA. And I grabbed some Tylenol for Randy.”

“Morphine. Whatever narcotics good ole Mr. Boyd has in stock,” Sam said. “I’m not picky.”

“But you’re clean now. You really want drugs in the house?” she said. “Wouldn’t it be a… temptation?” She was giving him the big eyes, that sweet, naïve face she had sometimes, which made him wonder what the fuck she’d been doing in LA the whole time she was there, besides auditions and endless acting classes. Every once in a while, it felt like she’d never actually left Nebraska.

“What do you think is going to happen if Arthie trips going to the cellar and breaks her leg? There’s no one to call, no ambulance, no hospital to go to. What about if Justine has appendicitis? If someone comes here and shoots me while you’re reloading your gun? We’re on our own. And that means we’re going to suffer if we don’t have anything to numb the pain,” he said. He was being harsh, he knew it, and she needed to hear it. “I can keep from snorting it all, because I know what it’s for. I know who it’s for.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Where does he keep it? The hard stuff,” Sam said.

“He has a safe in his office. I’ll have to shoot the lock off, he never told me the combination,” Ruth said.

“Didn’t trust you that far?” Sam asked.

“I was fourteen, Sam. In rural Nebraska,” she said.

“All the more reason—” Just then, there was a sound, indeterminate, high-pitched. Danger. Sam felt the cold thrill of it down his spine, beneath his heart. And then a ferocious, electric heat, to destroy whatever threatened her. He’d heard his grandfather and great-uncles talk about blood-lust, usually having to do with women or land, indistinguishable, but he knew he’d kill anyone who got near her, he felt it in every cell, his heart beating it out. The next word he uttered might be a roar, the sound an animal made without thinking.

“Go,” he said, almost human. Ruth ran towards the back, somewhere he couldn’t see. She still had the gun, so he pushed off all the pills on a shelf and grabbed it up, wielding it like it could do any good as a battering ram or a bludgeon. There was another shrill sound and then a terrible moment of silence.

The next sound was Ruth’s scream. And then a gunshot. 

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Sam ran. Towards the back of the store. Towards the sound Ruth had made, that echoed in the colossal suffocating silence of the pharmacy, the atmosphere that pressed down on them. That kept them from the soundless, breathless abyss of space. He ran and there she was, the gun still in her arms.

Her face pale, set, her blue eyes blank until he looked more closely and saw she was aware of everything.

“Ruth—”

“He’s dead,” she said, tilting her head instead of moving her hands, to use the long grey barrel of the shotgun as a guide.

“Did he try—”

“He was already dead. He shot himself,” she said, her voice as empty of emotion as he’d ever heard it. He wanted to take her in his arms, turn her away from what was before them, but he didn’t want to feel her resist. Or worse—ignore him. The office wasn’t a big one and Hank Boyd couldn’t have had all that much by way of hard drugs in the modest safe, but he’d had plenty of blood, because it was painted across the walls in wide gouts, fainter in some places and Sam understood those were where his brain had leavened the crimson with a pale color Sam couldn’t call grey. That color belonged to his hand, where there was an obvious gash and the half-moon of a bite-mark, the caked blood livid against the undead flesh, a shade even the best make-up artists could never quite match.

“He was attacked,” Sam said. “He killed himself to keep from becoming one of them.”

“I know,” Ruth said. “I still have to get the drugs out of the safe though.”

“Ruth, you don’t—”

“I do, I do because we can’t come back here, we can’t—Sam—” she broke off, all the strength gone from her voice. And then there was another noise, the same as before and Sam jumped because it was closer, too close—

“Hey, Susie,” Ruth said.

“What?”

“It’s Susie, Mr. Boyd’s cat,” Ruth said as a grey cat with pretensions to being Persian sat down in the doorway and made a sound halfway between a purr and a keen.

“She fucking immortal? Can’t be the same cat from when you were fourteen,” Sam said.

“He always calls them Susie,” Ruth said. “Can you get me another bag so I can get the drugs?”

He made her put a garbage bag over her clothes and she shoved what she could reach from the depths of the safe into another bag printed with Hank Boyd’s name. It was mostly Demerol and some morphine, with enough Valium to make Sam wonder about the popularity of mother’s little helper in the sticks. They topped the bag off with as many Oh Henrys, Charleston Chews and Zagnuts as they could; Debbie just shook her head when she pulled out the twenty-second Zagnut.

“What were you thinking? Who even likes these?”

Ruth was in the shower. They were all pretending they couldn’t hear her crying. 

When he went up to went up to his room an hour later, he found her sitting on the edge of his bed in a bathrobe, a towel hanging around her neck. Her hair was still wet. He took the towel, crouched in front of her and started gently rubbing her hair dry. It seemed like she hadn’t just cried herself out—she’d run out of words as well; there was no polite apology for coming into his room or leaving everyone downstairs without any explanation, not even any reminiscing about the summer she’d worked at Boyd’s or how worried she was about her parents. After a few minutes, she put her hand on his wrist to tell him to stop the toweling off, then wrapped her fingers around him holding him still.

“I’m here,” he said. “I’m here, Ruth.”

In the morning, he woke to the sound of her closing the drawer of the night-table, the faint metallic gleam on the box of condoms catching the weak dawn light; the wood snagged on its runner and she did something with her hand, some fucking legerdemain he hadn’t mastered, and got it to shut without his usual slam.

“There’s a trick to it,” she said and then she lay back down beside him, her face nestled against his chest, breathing softly. Alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zagnut is a candy bar produced and sold in the United States. It was launched in 1930 by the D. L. Clark Company, which sold it to Leaf later on and was acquired by Hershey Foods Corporation in 1996. Its main ingredients are peanut butter and toasted coconut.


	7. Chapter 7

They said eavesdroppers seldom hear good of themselves. But then, they’d also said no one had to worry about a fucking zombie apocalypse, so Sam wasn’t putting a lot of stock in they these days. And Ruth and Debbie had decided to have their heart-to-heart at the kitchen table, it wasn’t like they’d opted for the privacy of either woman’s bedroom. He could do his part holding up the fucking wall in the hallway and no one needed to be the wiser for it. 

“You’re happy, then?” Debbie said.

“Happy’s not the word I’d choose,” Ruth said. Sam might’ve started to freak the fuck out but he knew that reflective tone of hers.

“So, what word would you pick? Or did you find out that once you got what you thought you wanted, it wasn’t what you expected it to be?” Debbie asked. Debbie could easily be the Olympic gold medalist of holding a grudge, though it also sounded like she was thinking of her own life, the choices she’d made. She’d sold all her furniture and lived in the shell of her house before Vegas, hadn’t even bought herself a convertible with the cash she’d made. 

“It’s better, Sam is—we’re better even though everything is terrible, terrifying. He’s not, being with him, that’s what feels real. Sometimes, it’s the only thing that does,” Ruth said.

“He’s that good a fuck?” Debbie said wryly. 

“Yeah, he is,” Ruth said. Before he could feel much in the way of satisfied masculine pride, she added, “It’s nice.”

“Wow, Ruth, nice. That’s how everyone describes a really good, toe-curling fuck. ‘Nice,’” Debbie laughed.

“He never stops paying attention, he never forgets who he’s with,” she said. “I’m always enough, more than enough—I’m always sure I’m exactly who he wants.”

“Okay.” Debbie sounded unconvinced but hearing Ruth describe the most intimate relationship of his entire life so succinctly, so generously had him pinned like a fucking butterfly.

“He didn’t oversell himself in that dating video either,” Ruth said. “He’s good with his hands too and he doesn’t act like he’s doing me a favor when he goes down on me.”

“You don’t mind the mustache?” Debbie asked.

“Oh no,” Ruth said dreamily. Sam grinned. Damn straight she didn’t mind it. He didn’t mind the feeling of her loose curls against his thighs, as silky as if she were the model in a fucking Pert commercial.

“I think Mark is dead,” Debbie said, breaking the mood and managing to reassert conversational dominance all in one. She was a fucking genius when it came to shit like that.

“Debbie!”

“He hasn’t called and I’ve called him at least four times, once before we even left LA. He’s a dick, but he’s not a bad father and I think he would’ve called to check on Randy,” Debbie said. “I hope that bitch Susan’s dead along with him. Or maybe she bit him, sucked his fucking brains out, let them run down her pointy little chin.”

If Sam had any desire to keep making horror movies while living through one that was being neither expertly directed, written, shot nor lit, he would have cast Debbie as the lead and gone from there. She was a stone cold bitch when she let herself be and Sam didn’t feel quite as bad about introducing Randy to bourbon. The kid was going to need it, especially if all the therapists in LA and Boston got turned into zombies. The therapists in Manhattan might hold out a little longer, because New Yorkers didn’t give a fuck at baseline and no zombies were going to change that.

“It’ll be okay. Randy won’t remember him and maybe that’s not a huge loss,” Debbie said.

“It’ll mean something to him,” Ruth said.

“Then you can tell him. You knew Mark well enough, didn’t you?” Debbie said. 

It was supposed to gut Ruth, again, because evidently Debbie still wanted Ruth to suffer over getting fucked by the dickhead twice. It was that second time that Debbie stewed over, Sam knew, because that was the time that he would have ruminated over for years, that climb up the fire escape, the moment when Ruth considered kicking Mark out and then when she let him kiss her, his hands fumbling with her bra. Before, Ruth would have dropped her eyes and gone very still. Before there weren’t zombies and her parents weren’t probably dead and Sam didn’t pull up the hem of her heavy flannel nightgown to feel her smooth, bare thighs nights it wasn’t bitterly cold. 

“Fine. I’ll tell him how much Mark loved him. How proud he was and how he took videos of the first time Randy ate mashed sweet potato and walked into the living room and said Mama. How comfortable he was picking him up or crawling on the floor pretending to be a horse. How he didn’t try to stop you from taking Randy to Vegas or out of LA,” Ruth said. 

“You’ll tell him stories. Not the truth,” Debbie said.

“Stories are all we have, Debbie. Stories are why I fell in love with Sam, how I can sleep at night. Why I wake up,” Ruth said and she was Ruth and Zoya and Miss Julie and Miranda. Liberty Belle and Ms. Parsons from Justine’s unfinished movie and Hedda Gabler. “Anyone can tell the truth.”

Jesus Christ, he fucking loved her.

* * *

The truth was, the apocalypse was fucking boring. Fucking. Boring. And that wasn’t the sobriety talking, though Sam sort of couldn’t believe he was facing oblivion stone-cold sober. Justine and Ruth made it worthwhile but there were times he found himself daydreaming about blow, especially when the weather turned and the windows were white with snow. The farmhouse had a family Bible, not a Gideon, a handful of bestsellers from the 40s and 50s, a slim volume that claimed to be the collected works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the 1954 Betty Crocker cookbook. Ruth had a copy of _Vanity Fair_ and _The Unbearable Lightness of Being_ in her bag along with her much-read Stanislavsky. Justine had shame-facedly revealed she’d brought Jean Cocteau’s _Art of Cinema_ and Arthie had Danielle Steel’s _Family Album_ which she insisted she’d found in Melrose’s locker. With the possible exception of _Vanity Fair_ , it was the worst library he could imagine to face the end of humanity with and that was before Debbie regaled them with the lime cheese salad recipe. Beyond the books, there were a few packs of cards, a chess set missing half the pawns, and a kite. His brain might melt and leak out well before any zombies got to him.

“Ruth, are there any jigsaw puzzles?” Arthie asked.

“Fucking jigsaw puzzles?” Sam said. “That’s where we’re at?”

“Sorry, I don’t think so. I can look in the attic again though,” Ruth said patiently. “Sam, not everyone shares your…aversion to, what did you call it?”

“Mind-numbing, purposeless bullshit,” he said.

“I like jigsaw puzzles,” Arthie said. “They’re meditative.”

“What the fuck do you need to meditate about? Look out a window at the snow,” Sam said. He hunched his shoulders in the one heavy sweater he’d brought, knowing he was going to have to relent soon and accept the old clothes Ruth avoided admitting had belonged her great-uncle Clem’s, the lantern-jawed, wall-eyed creep in the fucking daguerreotype on the mantle. Every day was cold or colder or bitterly frigid and he couldn’t stay in the warmth of Ruth’s narrow bed much past seven, when it was unbearably awkward to meet his daughter in the hallway, going to for the morning’s first piss.

“You can’t keep complaining when you don’t even offer an alternative,” Debbie said. Ruth and Arthie nodded. They both had a dutiful, good-girl vibe that their GLOW avatars had contravened. Justine, a true Sylvia, was scowling and kicking the edge of the coffee table.

“We could read your screenplay,” she said. Goddamn traitor.

“I don’t fucking think so,” he said. It was enough that he’d let Ruth look at it this early on, actually reading her copious notes instead of skimming. As usual, they were insightful and highly legible. He’d revamped the whole second act after she slipped a page under his door like they were in some 1960s movie version of summer camp with Hayley fucking Mills.

“I’m sorry there isn’t more to read here. My grandparents had a pretty Calvinist approach to free time,” Ruth said. “We could plan a raid to the library, I guess.”

“No one’s going to die so that Sam can stop being bored,” Debbie said.

“I can teach you all how to play bridge,” Arthie offered. 

“Seriously, are you twenty-five or seventy?” Sam said. 

“It’s a four-person game. You can sit out, Sam,” Arthie said, in a rare show of spirit. She still wore her rainbow head-band but it was somehow drab against her shining dark hair. How lonely was she? He remembered her face at the strip club, her moony eyes and that fucking quiver in her voice when she watched Yolanda undulate across the stage _She’s really good, isn’t she?_

“The Decameron,” Ruth said, as if she’d been thinking hard, trying to solve a difficult problem like Fermat’s last fucking theorem. Debbie rolled her eyes and Justine shrugged.

“Ruth—”

“No, it’s perfect. It’s a collection of stories during the plague, it’s a masterpiece,” Ruth said. “He wrote it during an outbreak in the 1300s.”

“1353,” Sam said. Debbie looked shocked. It wasn’t a good look on her.

“Yeah, I know you think I’m a fucking dry drunk and a moron, Debbie. Close your mouth—you’ll catch flies,” he said. Ruth, bless her, laughed and covered it with the worst fake cough he’d ever heard; for an actress, her acting was occasionally like kid trying to pretend she hadn’t found the Christmas presents in her mom’s underwear drawer.

“Are we all writing stories?” Justine said, skipping right past the idea that they would get a copy and read it aloud. Writing one hundred stories seemed a far better option and that was considering Sam was no stranger to writer’s block.

“Yes. Whatever you want. And I’m still willing to learn bridge, Arthie,” Ruth said.

“I’ll teach Randy Italian,” Sam said. “Besides this Decameron shit.”

“You know how to say something more than curses?” That was his daughter, a true Sylvia woman, always ready to kick the legs out from under you. Zia Nunzia couldn’t have done any better and God knows, that old bitch had tried. His mother once said the nuns refused to take her as a novice, Nunzia was so mean. 

“Yeah. I didn’t speak English until I was seven,” Sam said. “And no, my first word wasn’t fuck you.”

“Oh. I didn’t—” Ruth said, inquisitive and careful, wanting to ask a dozen questions and remembering they weren’t lying in her twin bed, her cheek against his chest, as many quilts as she could find piled up on them. Her hand underneath his tee-shirt, tracing patterns in his chest hair. It was too fucking cold in Nebraska to sleep naked or anywhere close but she’d proven to be wonderfully creative. And limber. 

“You think he can learn it?” Debbie asked. Honest, for once. Scared her kid was stupid or broken or that he wouldn’t make it. Hell, no one knew if he could make it. There were blizzards and weeks of twenty below ahead and zombies who kept moving through white-outs, to press their frostbitten faces against a window, mouths open to eat.

“Yeah. It’s not hard,” Sam said. “Arthie can teach him Tamil. He’ll be a regular fucking genius.”

“How’d you know I speak Tamil?”

“Fuck, I just pay attention, Arthie. It’s not that hard,” he said. “What else do I have to do around here?”

“Besides Ruth?” Justine said. Ruth blushed but she smiled, a small, contented smile, more exhilarating than the first time he’d done blow. “You’re not denying it, huh?”

“What’s the point?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Decameron (subtitled Prince Galehaut) and sometimes nicknamed l'Umana commedia ("the Human comedy", as it was Boccaccio that dubbed Dante Alighieri's Comedy "Divine"), is a collection of novellas by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). The book is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men; they shelter in a secluded villa just outside Florence in order to escape the Black Death, which was afflicting the city. Boccaccio probably conceived of The Decameron after the epidemic of 1348, and completed it by 1353. The various tales of love in The Decameron range from the erotic to the tragic. Tales of wit, practical jokes, and life lessons contribute to the mosaic. In addition to its literary value and widespread influence (for example on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), it provides a document of life at the time. Written in the vernacular of the Florentine language, it is considered a masterpiece of classical early Italian prose.


	8. Chapter 8

“That was too close,” Sam said, after stacking the wood Debbie had brought in. At the rate they were going, they’d have to give up using the second floor for sleeping and camp out in the living room at night to stay warm. He could dimly imagine a world in which the farmhouse could be cozy, a bulwark against the brutal winter, but that world didn’t include fucking zombies or Randy’s endless sniffling.

“I got it,” Ruth said. Who knew she was a fucking sharpshooter? She’d taken out the stumbling zombie when it was less than a foot from Debbie, who’d been wrapped up so thoroughly against the blowing snow that she escaped any real splatter. Her scream had gotten swallowed in the wind’s howling. Justine had shoved a scalding hot mug of tea and whiskey into Debbie’s hands as soon as the wool mittens came off.

“Yeah, you did. But the rest of us aren’t Annie fucking Oakley, Ruth. And if the weather had been even slightly less godawful, Debbie might have gotten zombie shit on her face. In her eyes,” Sam said.

“Sam’s right,” Debbie said. She cradled the mug in her hands, her chapped lips pale, but her eyes remarkably steady. He had to give her credit for her quick recovery from her near miss. “We need better protection when we go out. And we need a protocol.”

“A protocol?” Ruth said.

“If someone’s exposed,” Debbie said. “If we decide to do anything besides just elimination.”

“Elimination? You mean murder,” Ruth said. “Execution.”

“She means keeping most of us alive until there’s a chance help is coming,” Sam said. They’d heard something garbled on the short-wave radio about the feds, a plan, inoculation. The women, except for Arthie, had been immediately hopeful about a vaccine. Arthie’s eyes had stayed shadowed, uneasy; she knew more about medicine and authoritarian governments than the rest of them. Sam was cynical by nature and he hadn’t been disabused of the inclination by any organization or system over the course of his life.

“There’s that shed,” Arthie said thoughtfully. “The one farthest from the house.”

“Yeah, that’s not a bad idea,” Sam said.

“We’re going to tie someone up in the shed with, like a blanket and a thermos of soup, and hope they survive long enough to convince us they’re not turned?” Ruth asked.

“We have enough rope? Then, yes,” Sam said. “I think one of the kitchen chairs would work. The thermos is a nice touch, Ruth. I hope it’s plaid.”

“I wasn’t being serious,” she said.

“Yes, you were,” Debbie said. “You don’t want to believe it but you were. You’d already imagined it. Problem is, we don’t know how long the incubation period is.”

“I think forty-eight hours is a decent guess,” Arthie said. “When you think about LA and what it was like by the time we got here. Seventy-two if we want to be really conservative. Plus, I don’t think anyone’s going to make it much longer than that in the shed, even if they’re not infected.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Sam said. 

“I don’t like it,” Ruth said but something in her voice kept anyone from interrupting. “But I don’t have another idea. And I guess it’s better than just shooting whoever’s exposed.”

“Needs must when the devil drives,” Justine said, pushing her hair back from her face. “That’s something my mom used to say.”

“Rosalie’s a smart woman,” Sam said. “Don’t count her out. I’d take her over a zombie any day of the fucking week.”

* * *

“I’m sorry you had to wait so long,” Ruth said, the night Randy first asked for more bread in Tamil, repeating himself when Arthie paused, stunned for a second that someone in the farmhouse actually belonged to her. Debbie beamed, once Arthie confirmed Randy had said something intelligible, but the conversation moved along as soon as Justine handed over another uneven slice off the heavy wholemeal loaf.

“Excuse me?” Arthie said. It was her turn to wash the dishes, a chore she didn’t mind very much, unlike Justine, who acted like the water was “fucking hydrochloric acid” according to her father. Sam and Justine were playing gin rummy while they argued about Ingmar Bergman. 

“For someone to, I don’t know, to be yours. The rest of us were already so…intertwined, for good or for bad, we weren’t on our own. The way you’ve been,” Ruth said. “Until now. Now you and Randy have something none of the rest of us have.”

“I can teach you too, if you want,” Arthie said.

“You don’t have to,” Ruth said. “It’s okay to have something special you don’t share. It’s necessary. And Randy’s pretty little, I can’t imagine he’s capable of a complex conversation yet.”

“He just asked for some bread,” Arthie said.

“But he asked you. Not his mother. Not me or Sam, who’s the closest thing he’s got to a father here,” Ruth said. “If I’m not being too nosey, what does he call you?”

“Chitthi,” Arthie said. “It means your mother’s younger sister, like auntie sort of.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yes, it is,” Arthie said. 

That night, she dreamed of the beauty parlor in Vegas where she’d had her hair cut, how it had felt to have the older woman’s hands in her hair, the coolness of the scissor’s blades against her neck. Of looking in the mirror she’d been handed and seeing herself, hearing Yolanda call out her name. Of her sister Nanthini, opening a door.


	9. Chapter 9

It was a relatively balmy day, around fifteen degrees and sunny, so they’d spread out in the house, glad for some time apart. Arthie had the kitchen table staked out with the hokey folk-art jigsaw puzzle Ruth had unearthed from the attic and Justine was sprawled across the living room sofa with her headphones back on, listening to the same goddamn cassette, doing her best impression of a surly teen. It was pretty fucking solid. Debbie was calling people, working her way through her list of phone numbers, leaving messages for ghosts for the most part; no one, not even Sam, had the heart to tell her to give up. Sam had been napping in his room, his latest attempt at a Decameron story a pile of shitty pages on the side of the bed Ruth could have slept on if she ever came to his room (her latest, an elegant little fable about two sisters, was clearly inspired by Zoya and Olga, but had an unerring, poetic grace about it that had made him equal parts envious and proud.) They’d gotten into the habit of sleeping pressed together in her twin bed, the wall at Sam’s back. It was easier to wake up in the double because the air was cool around him and the light off the snow almost fucking angelic. And because he heard Ruth singing across the hall.

“Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high/ There’s a land that I heard of once in a lullaby…”

Grigoiy had said Ruth had a good voice “not an embarrassment,” after he took her to his cousin’s bris. He hadn’t said much more than that, but he wasn’t a man given to much elaboration, at least not in English; Sam had heard him sound slightly-less-than-laconic on the phone when he was speaking Russian. He spared a thought, not a prayer, for the man, who’d already had one chilling escape under his worn leather belt, then let himself listen to Ruth’s contralto. She wasn’t a professional singer, not anywhere close, but she would have held her own in a high school musical or any role where the actress had to make it through a verse and a chorus.

“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue/ And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true…”

Sam stood in the doorway of the room that had once been Ruth’s parents and was now Debbie and Randy’s. Ruth sat in the maple rocking chair in the corner, the light from the windows filling the room without getting in her eyes. Or Randy’s—she had him in her arms, his drowsy face pressed against her breast, his fair hair bright against her dark blouse, a quilt wrapped around her slender shoulders. She had the rocking chair moving in time with the adagio tempo she’d chosen for the song, holding the notes as long as she needed to, a degree of skill he hadn’t expected. Randy, whom Sam generally found mildly entertaining at best, colossally irritating the rest of the time, was for once neither, only a baby, vulnerable, lovable. It was possibly the most arresting fucking scene he’d ever looked at. And then Ruth caught his eye and smiled and broke his heart.

“Someday I’ll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds/ Are far behind me…”

If anyone had the balls to fucking ask him, Sam would have said his relationship with Ruth was the most intimate one he’d ever had. That he understood her better than any other woman, that she made him understand himself, the shit he hadn’t ever wanted to look at tolerable since she was looking at it too. Fucking her, sleeping with her, waking up to see her face tucked beneath his chin, the scent of them in her bed—he thought he’d known how much it meant, how much he needed her, wanted her. And now, suddenly, he knew what he thought was everything wasn’t all he wanted. He wanted the child in her arms to have her dark curls, Justine’s dark eyes, his child. Theirs.

“Somewhere over the rainbow bluebirds fly/ Birds fly over the rainbow/ Why then, oh why can’t I?”

He was still, leaning against the doorframe, stunned by the urgency of his desire, the basic rightness of it like the blood within his veins, thrumming through his heart. Ruth was still rocking, Randy’s eyes shut, the faint whistle of his breath audible in the humming silence. Ruth was watching him steadily. Her blue eyes missed nothing. He opened his mouth to say something, then paused when she shook her head very slightly, her lips shaping the word _Later_. Later would be after she laid Randy down for the rest of his nap or after the unmemorable dinner, when she opened her bedroom door for him, when she lay in his arms, thoroughly fucked, panting against his ear _oh Sam oh god_. Sam knew he wasn’t going to forget and neither was she; he wasn’t going to stop wanting more, even if he could never get it. It wouldn’t be because she didn’t want to give it to him and that was something. He closed his eyes briefly, rubbing the back of his neck, the place she clung to when she came. When he opened them, she’d still be looking at him.

“Sam, he answered,” Debbie said, her clear, silvery voice a shock even though she’d kept it pitched fairly low. Careful not to wake Randy.

“What?”

“Bash. He answered. When I called. He’s alive,” Debbie said, her cheeks bright red, as if she’d slapped on enough rouge to look like a painted china doll and goddammit, Sam knew how much it aged him to even think that. She looked ten years younger except for the grey she hadn’t been able to keep out of her blonde hair. “He’s got a plane ready.”

“Ready?”

“To get us the hell out of here,” Debbie said.


	10. Chapter 10

“Get in already, Ruth,” Sam said. She was frowning, possibly more than she had been, and he admitted his tone might not have been the best. “It’s okay, just get in and we’ll talk.”

“I don’t think I can do it,” she said. Sam ran a hand through his hair. He was capable of being patient, it was dialing down the knee-jerk irritability (and copious, accompanying profanity) that he needed to work on.

“Tell me why,” he said. The bathroom, normally a fucking austere space, was warm and steamy, filled with the sweet scent of the half-capful baby oil he’d wheedled from Debbie to dump in the tub; the window that overlooked the endless, snowy acres was fogged up, keeping the dangerous, frozen world at a safe remove. He’d boiled a half a dozen kettles-worth of water to supplement what the hot water heater could manage, nearly giving himself a goddamn hernia climbing the stairs. And now Ruth was looking at the claw-foot tub like it was full of lava and crocodiles. As if lava alone wouldn’t be enough of a deterrent. Then he had a sudden grim thought.

“Is this about Tom Grant?” It seemed like a lifetime ago to him but he hadn’t been the one in the room with the dickhead. 

“No. It’s not that-- they all know we’re in here, together,” she said. “They’ll know what we’re doing, they’ll all be thinking about it. Imagining it.”

“Ruth, hate to break it to you, but they already know. And none of them want to think about what we do. Her father’s sex life is the last thing Justine wants to imagine, which I know because she has fucking told me. Repeatedly. Usually when I run into her in the hallway first thing in the morning coming out of your room. Debbie thinks I’m a fucked-up addict and Arthie, well, she’s all wrapped up in pining for Yo, not a Byronic hero, which would be giving me a fuckload of credit, to be honest,” Sam said, trying not to sound too self-pitying when it came to Debbie’s assessment, because there were plenty of days he agreed with her. “And for the record, I wasn’t planning on fucking you in the tub.”

“No?” she said, finally his wry Ruth again.

“I wasn’t planning on it, no. I nearly threw my back out carrying the water up and there’s baby oil in there—the last thing I want is a bathtub-sex-related injury during the zombie apocalypse with nothing but aspirin and your grandma’s old hot water bottle to get me through,” Sam said. “Now will you get in? Please?”

“Okay,” she said. He was already down to his underwear beneath the worn plaid old-man bathrobe she’d found for him. It was easy to shrug it off and the briefs, enjoying the appreciative glance she threw at him just before she pulled her sweater over her head. He got into the tub carefully, sighing as the water sloshed around him, fighting the urge to close his eyes in transitory bliss because watching Ruth undress without the usual alacrity born of a frigid bedroom or the frantic urge to fuck was a rare and exquisite delight.

He wouldn’t have said she was his type when she arrived for that first audition, but he definitely been messing with her when he made the remark about people not finding her attractive. She’d been almost too conventionally pretty for him then, with those big blue eyes and fair skin, except for her unhappiness, which had called to him like a fucking siren. That and the way she somehow had trusted him, even when he hurt her. Now, she was necessary, set apart from any other woman-- the shadow beneath her pert breasts, that curve of her shin and her ankle, the hollow at the base of her throat and the delicate tracing of her spine were something beyond erotic, cherished. 

“Oh,” she sighed, easing herself into the tub and leaning back against him. The water level rose, lapping against the tops of her breasts. For a moment, it was enough to feel her pressed against him, the tension going out of her shoulders and neck, her hair curling even more in the humid air. He wrapped one arm around her waist, let the other rest on her thigh; there were no bubbles to obscure the view but the oil softened the water, made it another kind of silk around them.

“I can’t go, Sam,” she said. He’d been waiting for this, it was the reason for the stoked stove and the kettles and the squat stub of a candle he’d lit and placed on the top of the toilet tank. There’d been a discussion at the kitchen table but it had been brief, too brief to be honest. “I can’t go to Aspen and give up on my parents. I have to wait for them, to give them a chance. No matter what Debbie says. But you—and Justine—you can. You don’t have to stay here.”

“You think I’d fucking leave you?” he said, trying not to get too angry. He’d left before, he’d pushed her away and kept secrets. She wasn’t being insulting. She thought she was being realistic.

“I think you want to protect Justine. She’s your daughter and she’s not really a grown-up and there’s a good chance you’re the only parent she has left,” Ruth said.

“That’s all true. It doesn’t mean I’ll go anywhere without you,” he said. 

“But what if this is her best chance? Yours?” Ruth asked. She arched her neck to look up at him, so serious, so lovely. He tightened his arm around her.

“Yeah, maybe it is. And maybe it’s not. I mean, it’s Bash running the show. We think,” Sam said. “I worked with that guy for a while—him being in charge isn’t a goddamn ringing endorsement for me. He has no hesitation to just do whatever he wants, without talking to anyone first, Debbie knows that better than anyone. And once we’re there, getting out might be impossible—we wouldn’t even have your truck and god knows, my Cadillac isn’t made for winter roads in Nebraska.”

“Everything he said about his connections to the government, getting priority for a vaccine… Heck, they have central heating and a movie theater,” Ruth said. “Everything would be getting back to normal. Kind of.”

“Do you want me to go? It sounds like you’re arguing for that,” Sam said. Christ, that was not a scenario he’d imagined.

“No!” she exclaimed. “No, I don’t want you to go. Or Justine. I don’t want any of you to go, even though it’s so hard here, but I don’t want to hold you back. I don’t want you to make sacrifices, to risk your lives on my say-so.”

“Staying with you isn’t a fucking sacrifice,” he said. “I want you. I love you. Your loyalty and your persistence and your goddamn earnestness. And if I hadn’t been able to get in my car and start driving here to find you, I think we’d all be dead—”

“Don’t say that,” she interrupted, that wrinkle back between her brows. He ducked his head to kiss her, feeling her reach up to bring him closer. He moved his hand at her waist to her hip, to keep them from sliding further under the cooling water. The kiss became deeper, messier, his desire for her amplified by her eagerness for him, his cock hardening against her back, her hand clutching his thigh. Her tongue stroked against his, rutting into his mouth, too bold to be obscene; his hips jerked, the urge to thrust against her wordless, irresistible. She pulled away, just far enough to laugh and murmur,

“You weren’t planning to fuck me in the tub.”

He took a breath, looking at her body in the water, the curves of her breasts and her belly, the crease at her thigh, the thicket of curls between her legs. She was too slender, even for her, but she was still vibrant, strong; there was still something indomitable in her that drew him to her and an unwillingness to let the dark overtake them.

“I didn’t plan it. And you’re not exactly lying back and thinking of fucking England,” he said. She laughed again, lower, softer. He was speaking before he even thought, “You said, before you said _Later…_ ”

“It’d be the right baby, Sam. Just the wrong time,” she said. “Maybe if we went to Aspen—”

“No, this is home. I can—we can wait,” he said, as if it weren’t a question.

“Yeah, we can,” she said, kissing him again, very gently. 

“But not for everything,” he said, letting her feel him, touching her more intimately. She drew in her breath sharply, gave him a wicked look that he might have thought was Zoya if he didn’t know better.

“Out. Now,” she ordered.


	11. Chapter 11

“You’re out of your mind, Ruth,” Debbie announced. “Sam, you’ve got to talk sense to her. She can’t stay here alone.”

“Who says she’s staying alone? I’m not leaving,” Sam said, looking over at Justine for confirmation. She nodded and then rolled her eyes at his deference. “We’re not, Justine’s staying here too.”

“Are you crazy? Bash has a jet waiting for us, a whole wing, a goddamn sauna and a saltwater pool, a production studio. A Michelin-starred French chef. No more vegetable-bean soup and vintage pickle-of-the-week and terrible bread. And um, by the way, no more zombies,” Debbie said.

“I liked the pickled squash,” Justine said. “I thought it would be disgusting but it really wasn’t.”

“You trust Bash now?” Sam said. “After everything he’s done? Or is the possibility of luxury enough to risk your son’s life with that dickhead?”

“Fuck you, Sam,” Debbie said.

“I don’t think the bread’s that bad,” Arthie said.

“Debbie, no one’s stopping you and Randy from going,” Ruth said. “But I’m not leaving when my parents could still be trying to get to me.”

“Oh my God, Ruth, they’re dead. Grow up. Stop living in a dream world,” Debbie exclaimed. 

“Jesus fucking Christ, Debbie—"

“What makes you the authority on everything? Why do you even care?” Ruth asked. 

“Because you’re my friend and I don’t want you to die because you can’t deal with reality,” Debbie said. “Because you’re wrong all the time, Ruth. So wrong.”

“I’m not doing this with you. Again. You came to my home when you needed a place to stay and I took you in,” Ruth said. Sam did not point out the way she’d held him at gunpoint when he knocked on the door. “You want to leave, that’s your prerogative and I wish you well, but I’m not going to let you just trash every decision I’ve ever made to justify your own choices.”

“You’re not being fair—I care about you,” Debbie said. Justine let out an enormous sigh and muttered “Here we go.” Arthie looked like she might welcome the arrival of a zombie in the next ten seconds, offering up her neck for easy access.

“I know you do,” Ruth said. “But the way you care about me makes me feel bad. Most of the time. I don’t have what you do and I don’t want what you want—that doesn’t make me a failure.”

“This is about the directing job at Eden? Because I don’t notice you laying into Justine for not casting you in her movie,” Debbie said. “Or Sam, for that matter.”

“Are you going to tell me Sam’s all wrong for me next? That I was better off as a substitute English teacher at fucking Ralston High? Call Bash, call him right now and tell him to send the plane, they can try to land on the west acreage, so you can get the hell out—”

“Is anybody home? Hello?” 

Ruth had stopped as soon as they heard the rhythmic thump at the front door. It was Arthie whose eyes lit up first, who leapt up from the sofa to open the door, letting in an immediate bitter draft of air only slightly blocked by the bundled-up figure squinting at the light. Almost inaudibly, Ruth whispered “Daddy?” as Arthie called out:

“It’s Carmen!”

* * *

“You can’t just come in,” Debbie said quickly.

“It’s freezing out there!” Justine said. “And it’s going to be freezing in here in like a minute.”

“She’s worried you’re infected,” Sam put in, trying to forestall another blow-up while still hearing the heart-breaking echo of Ruth’s voice wishing for her father. Daddy. What she must have called him as a little girl and maybe still did. She looked stunned by Carmen’s arrival and her disappointment that it wasn’t her parents.

“Infected?” Carmen said. “With what?”

“The zombie virus,” Sam said. “Randy’s here too, we have to keep him safe. And we’ve had a couple of near-misses, where people could’ve gotten exposed without being bitten.”

“Me and Kurt are safe. I promise. We were close to the car when they came,” Carmen said. “We got away, I think we might have been the only ones—"

“Kurt’s here too?” Arthie said.

“Yeah, he was putting the car out back, where it’s harder to see,” Carmen said. 

“How’d you even know how to find us here?” Arthie said.

“I told her,” Ruth answered. “After she left Vegas, we talked a few times on the phone and I told her she was always welcome here, while she was touring. If she wanted a home-cooked meal, a better shower than in a motel. Free laundry.”

“We can’t talk here like this all night,” Debbie said. “It’s too cold and it defeats the whole point of preventing an exposure.” 

“We can stay in the car. We’ve already been doing that,” Carmen offered. She sounded tired but she’d never been a complainer and Sam didn’t suppose she was going to start now, even though nearly everyone would agree she had enough fucking reasons and that was without hearing much about what it had taken to get to Nebraska.

“It’s too cold,” Ruth argued. “You’ll die of hypothermia.”

“Lock us in,” Debbie said. “Randy and me. In the bedroom, with extra blankets and the hot water bottles and something hot to drink. No one thinks Carmen and Kurt are trying to hurt us but we shouldn’t take any unnecessary risks.”

“That could work,” Ruth said. “You head up and I’ll put the kettle on. And warm up some soup for Carmen and Kurt.”

Once Carmen and Kurt were settled on the couch with mugs of soup, the sound of Randy’s evening squawking petering out upstairs, Sam found Ruth in the kitchen. She was standing in front of the kitchen sink, her hands resting on its scrubbed enamel lip, staring out into the moonless night.

“I’m sorry, Ruth,” he said, resting his hand very lightly at the small of her back.

“What?”

“It wasn’t them,” he said. He didn’t say more, didn’t need to. He could feel her considering whether to say something about how she’d hoped, whether it was foolishness or stubbornness or denial. Whether to thank him. She discarded it all. They were quiet, but it was a silence full of what he knew of her and how much she’d let him know. She didn’t say anything but shifted near enough he could turn his head and graze her temple with his lips, then look out into the darkness. There was a white blur visible near the eastern edge of the horizon, closest to the distant dawn. It might be the clouds of a coming storm or a trembling mass of the undead, moving so slowly it was impossible to tell if they were approaching or in retreat.


	12. Chapter 12

“So, are there like marauding bands of bikers out there?” Justine asked. Sam could tell beneath her glib delivery that she was genuinely scared. He envied Debbie upstairs with her son. She could console Randy easily, her voice in the night enough to drive away any monster, her hand on his small back sufficient to return him to sleep.

“No,” Carmen said. Kurt was quiet, looked close to nodding off. He’d evidently driven the last six hours without a break and thought he hadn’t said much, Sam had the clear sense that along the way, the younger man had seen some shit he wasn’t eager to talk about. “I get why you’d think that, but it’s really mostly empty. Whole towns with no lights on, no traffic lights, no sign of anyone. If you see someone, they almost never stop. They just keep driving.”

It was possible she was lying, but Sam didn’t care. Justine’s face relaxed into its regular scowl.

“What about the zombies?” Justine asked. 

“Isn’t that the fucking sixty-four thousand dollar question,” Sam remarked, buying Carmen some time.

“There’re a lot of them,” Kurt said. “They don’t move that fast but you hardly ever see one by itself.”

“More in the cities, but they’re on the highways now. Too many to shoot, even if you had enough guns and bullets,” Carmen said.

“I don’t get it,” Justine said.

“It’s arithmetic—” Arthie began.

“No, why? Where’d they come from? What the fuck even happened?” Justine said and then she was crying, the tear-to-snot ratio not in her favor and he was her father and loved her regardless. Before Sam could do anything, Ruth put an honest-to-God lace-trimmed hankie in Justine’s hand, nodding encouragingly as Justine used it and then balled it up in her hand like it had become a fucking security blanket.

“Nobody knows,” Sam said.

“That’s bullshit,” Ruth said, surprising him. And Justine and Arthie. Carmen looked like nothing could surprise her anymore, which was some ominous shit right there. Kurt was asleep.

“Somebody knows. Somebody’s figuring it out right now. Maybe they already have. We just don’t know about it. This isn’t the world, this farm. The world’s bigger than us,” Ruth said.

“I think it’s a virus,” Arthie said. “It started like an illness, like an epidemic. That makes more sense that an exposure to something toxic.”

“But why?” Justine said. Jesus Christ, he forgot sometimes how young she was. She still thought there were reasons things happened. There was a long pause, broken only by a soft snore from Kurt. 

“Because yesterday was Thursday. Because we don’t live on Jupiter. Because we got to have roses and Coriolanus and, and, crème de menthe,” Ruth said finally. 

“You like crème de menthe?” Sam asked. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

“My mother’s favorite cocktail’s a grasshopper,” she said. “She used to let me have a sip when they had cocktail parties. I thought it was the height of glamor.”

“She has shitty taste in cocktails,” Sam said, knowing Ruth would appreciate the verb tense more than the criticism.

“So, we’re just stuck here until someone comes to rescue us?” Justine said.

“Or until the pickles give out,” Sam said. “Unless you want to set up a lab in the cellar and develop a cure. But as I recall, you barely passed chemistry and we agreed it wasn’t a big deal because you were going to work in film, which you specifically referred to as fucking ‘film’ like your name was Anouk or Sigrid. Or just waitress.”

“D’you have a radio?” Carmen asked. It was amazing how effortlessly she created a sense of fucking vast imperturbable calm, sitting on the old sofa, wrapped in the afghan Randy had thrown up on during the trip out. He hadn’t realized how much he missed that, missed her. “Because sometimes we heard, not news exactly, but messages that sounded promising. Bad sometimes though. Phoenix, it was bad there and Reno.”

“We do. And we have Bash, sort of,” Ruth said. Interesting to hear her say they had Bash…

“What does that mean?” Carmen asked. Yeah, she’d always had something of a tendre for the guy. If women ever figured out how generous they were to the shitty men in their lives, that would really be an apocalypse and Jupiter and its fucking red spot wouldn’t be too far to go.

“He’s talking about sending a plane to take us to his Aspen Shangri-La-Xanadu,” Ruth said. “But maybe we should ask for supplies instead. Including a good radio. Like the Berlin airlift, but just to us. We’re Berlin.”

“If we’re asking for shit, make him send real coffee,” Sam said. “Folger’s crystals aren’t fucking cutting it.”

“Chocolate. And penicillin,” Arthie added. “Cheez-its. Oh my god, Ruth, please ask him for Cheez-its.”

“What if he doesn’t send anything?” Justine asked.

“Then we’re no worse off than we were before,” Ruth said, in full Girl Scout leader mode. She was faking it but he was probably the only one who could tell her heart wasn’t in it all the way. “Better, because we have Carmen and Kurt here now, it’ll be easier to do scavenging raids.”

“Hope you like pickled raisins and okra, Carmen,” Justine said. “And the specialty of the house, rutabaga pie. Imagine if a pizza was covered in rotting compost—and then imagine you’re lucky and get to eat that instead of the rutabaga thing.”

“It misses having cheese,” Ruth said apologetically. 

“What doesn’t?” Sam said. “Maybe Bash can pony up a fucking block of decent parm.”


	13. Chapter 13

The second her bedroom door closed behind them, Ruth leaned up against him and said very softly,

“Make love to me. Pretend it’s that night at the bar. Pretend you just told me I’m a nightmare and it’s not too late and you want to take me home.”

Sam’s hands went to her waist automatically, as if she’d hit him with some fucking triangular rubber hammer when she said _Make love to me_ and he moved without any need for thought, any desire for it. Except he did want to know why.

“Ruth?”

“I need to be somewhere else. With you. I need to act, I need to be an actor and I need you to be a director and I need all of this to be another world, another goddamn universe and the only constant is you. Us,” she said, letting the words tumble over each other. 

“Don’t you want to know how it would have been, if it hadn’t gone wrong?” she added, not waiting for him to answer. “I do, I want to know, I want you to show me, Sam. Tell me.”

She was looking at him in desperation, in exhaustion, as if he were her only refuge; a woman had never looked at him like that before. And now he knew he never wanted another woman to look at him that same way. Her lips were parted, still curved around those last words, the most direct declaration of love he’d ever received, so he did what he had to do and kissed her, the way he had that first moment at the bar. His hand at the back of her neck and then her shoulder, tipping her head to rest on his arm so he had command of them both. Her hand at his jaw, her thumb stroking his cheek, was confirmation of his recollection. He remembered how she’d moved, how easily she was recreating the caress. She was a brilliant actress and the role Justine wouldn’t cast her in would have been too small for her; she wasn’t acting at all, she was so exposed to him, her breath so sweet in his mouth he could hardly bear it. Could hardly keep from taking her further into himself, knowing he was wanting her too much compared with the time before. That past she wanted to escape to, simpler in its falseness. That sweet, ephemeral happiness.

“I would have run every fucking red light,” he said. “I would have kissed you again as soon as I turned the car off, with my hand on the keys. I would have stumbled a little getting out, opening the door for you.”

“Such a gentleman,” she said, sighing a little as he angled her head to let him kiss the side of her neck, a hand slipped beneath the open collar of her shirt.

“I would have offered you something to drink once we were inside, but I wouldn’t have waited to hear you answer before I kissed you again. And again,” he said. He pulled her closer, took a few steps in the direction of the bed, swallowing her response the way he imagined doing, his tongue in her mouth, tasting her. A hand stroking along her ribs, grazing her breast. Bringing her snug against him.

“I didn’t want anything,” she said, the fantasy a past she was claiming for them both.

“I would’ve taken you to my bedroom,” he said, unable to envision how they’d have gotten from point A to point B—laughing? Would he have swept her up into his arms, hushing her when she fussed about how heavy she was? Would they have walked, silent and shy as first lovers, hand-in-hand until he opened the bedroom door and they both saw the rumpled bed waiting for them, silvery-blue in the moonlight?

“I would have pulled that goddamn sweater over your head, cursing the whole time.” She would have been flushed and smiling, her hair coming free from its ponytail, the curls soft around her face. Unfastening her bra with a flick of his fingers and then dropping it so he could cup her breasts in his hands the way he’d wanted to since that time he’d walked in on her, topless with Debbie. _Oh_ , she would have said, the moment infinite, cut short by her hands untucking his shirt, fumbling with the buttons.

“I would have wanted to take it slow, not to rush, but I wouldn’t have been able to help myself,” he said, his hands at the waist of her worn jeans, sliding his palms under the denim, beneath the thin cotton of her panties. “I’d have promised you—”

“Promised me what?” she said, toeing off the jeans and her underwear, her button-down hanging open, her fair skin almost shimmering in the dim room. He was harder than he’d ever been but he was keeping a tight rein on himself; this was what she needed, what she’d asked him for.

“That I’d make love to you all night long. That I’d fuck you when you wanted that,” he said. He took her in his arms, pressing his erection against her belly, then walked her the few steps back to the bed and settled himself on top of her. How delicately made she was and how beautiful, how much herself even when she was trying to be someone else. Some other Ruth, one less wounded, less wise.

“This okay?” he muttered, trying to gauge the expression in her dark blue eyes.

“Almost,” she said, arching her back so she could shove his jeans down. He scrambled around gracelessly to get them off, then yanked his own sweater and shirt off, managing to put his glasses on the crowded nightstand. He was close enough to her he didn’t need them to see her face. Her hands were on his shoulders, stroking through his chest hair; the moonlight was generous, making his grey silver. She was reaching down, intent, not impatient.

“Spread your legs for me, Ruth,” he said, feeling how wet she was, the rich scent of her desire tantalizing. “I wouldn’t have gone down on you the first time,” rubbing his cock against her, pushing inside with one thrust of his hips, her thighs around his hips, her gaze holding his steadily.

“Even if I’d asked?” she said, her hands on his ass, urging him to move.

“I’d have told you I wanted to taste my come on you. In you. You’d have liked that, wouldn’t you, _cuore mio_?”

“Yes, oh yes, Sam, more, more—” Ruth was trembling beneath him, matching his pace as he sped up, not giving either of them a chance to do more than breathe; he leaned down to kiss her, his tongue in her mouth mimicking his cock in her pussy. It was impossible how much he wanted her, how every second it was more.

“You close?” he said. “You would have been, wouldn’t you? Aren’t you?

“Yes, oh, that’s—that’s, oh, Sam, God, now, now,” she cried, tensing up just before he came, holding on to him as he slumped over her, burying his face against her neck. Running her fingers through his hair, onto the damp skin of his nape, his shoulders. She reached to pull the quilt up over them, murmuring _no, not yet_ when he started with pull back.

“I would have fallen asleep,” he said, mumbling really against her throat. “That’s the truth.”

“I would have liked it,” she said.

“I would have been too caught up to ask you about using a condom,” he admitted. “I would’ve been fucking selfish, I would’ve been ashamed when I woke up.”

“I was on the pill,” she said. “We’re safe now, I would have said something.”

He pulled away just enough to look at her face. “Was that good? Was it what you wanted?”

“Yes. Thank you,” she said, making him laugh and slip free.

“You don’t have to thank me,” he said. “I wasn’t doing you a favor.”

“I know. But it was a lot to ask,” she said.

“Nothing’s a lot between us. Nothing’s too much,” he said, wanting her to know without wondering first.

“You can-- we can sleep now,” she said.

He woke a few hours later, the big spoon again. He felt her wake up, the soft movements she made when she was conscious. Bringing his left hand to rest against her heart.

“What’s your middle name?” he asked. His voice was rough with sleep, low, masking any embarrassment at not knowing. At imagining saying it as part of a vow.

“Evangeline,” she said.

“Fuck.”

“I know. Not much to choose from,” she said. He’d once told her the name Ruth was terrible. Now it was something beyond lovely.

“Family name?”

“No, the poem. Longfellow. ‘THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,/ Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight…’” she said.

“You memorized the whole fucking thing, didn’t you?” he said, kissing her shoulder.

“When I was thirteen. I can’t remember all of it now,” she said. “It was my father’s favorite.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter in which I definitively earn the E rating :)
> 
> Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie is an epic poem by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, written in English and published in 1847. The poem follows an Acadian girl named Evangeline and her search for her lost love Gabriel, set during the time of the Expulsion of the Acadians. The idea for the poem came from Longfellow's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Longfellow used dactylic hexameter, imitating Greek and Latin classics. Though the choice was criticized, it became Longfellow's most famous work in his lifetime and remains one of his most popular and enduring works. The poem had a powerful effect in defining both Acadian history and identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More recent scholarship has revealed the historical errors in the poem and the complexity of the Expulsion and those involved, which the poem ignores


	14. Chapter 14

Curiously, since nearly all of them had spent much of their recent time in Vegas, no one took responsibility for starting the poker game. They’d started out using a collection of checkers, pawns and one set of real poker chips that they’d assembled after various scavenging sorties which had also yielded a positively shocking amount of kirsch, enough yarn for Ruth to make good on her threat of knitting everyone a sweater (not just a scarf), and what really had turned out to be twelve dozen fucking containers of potted meat as Ruth had averred. Once you got beyond its shitty appearance, it made a welcome addition to their meals; they’d learned not to waste any on Randy, who liked to use it as a replacement for Playdoh or pomade. They were still working on Ruth’s Decameron project although Sam categorically refused to talk about his ‘process’ and there had been a number of spirited discussions about changes they should have made to the GLOW storylines, but now, without any formal acknowledgement, they sat down at the kitchen table every night after the dishes were cleared and started betting.

“Cash is fucking boring to play for,” Sam said, after a week where the stakes got higher and higher, but remained the now worthless US dollar. No other currency would have been much better. Arthie owed him eight thousand bucks but what was the point? There was nothing to buy, nowhere to go, and what had seemed mildly charming when they began was now just another dismal reminder of how small the world had become. Boring was the word he chose because it was less depressing and he might not admit to it, but he wasn’t actively trying to destroy the fucking morale in the house.

“We could play for the title, for the honor of it,” Kurt said.

“Jesus Christ, I don’t want to play for the fucking honor of it,” Sam said, shaking his head in disgust. “Don’t be such a pussy, Kurt—”

“Hey, that’s not very nice!” Ruth exclaimed. Justine rolled her eyes and Sam did wonder, again, how Ruth had survived an American high school and literally any auditions in LA. 

“Poker’s not about nice. It’s about lying and luck and usually, about hot women and good bourbon and a Cuban,” Sam said.

“That’s Vegas,” Debbie said.

“And Atlantic City,” Ruth added. It was weird when they ganged up on him but it made everyone in the house feel better. Every once in a while, you were able to get a sense of what they’d been like when they were both starting out in LA, going to auditions together, eating cheap spaghetti, sharing one tiny, expensive bottle of Giorgio that they dabbed sparingly on their pulse points. “This is Nebraska.”

“How do we even know that anymore?” Justine said. “We could have all been raptured in our sleep and be on a spaceship or in a lab. Or heaven.”

“Not even Carmen would believe this is heaven, Justine,” Sam said.

“What d’you mean, not even Carmen?” Kurt said. He was slow to rile but like anyone, he had his no-fly zones, and the time on tour had only made him more protective of his sister.

“She’s the nicest person here, the best of us. The only one Saint Peter’d let through the fucking pearly gates,” Sam said.

“I’m an atheist,” Carmen said.

“Don’t say that, Carmen. At least not out loud,” Kurt said.

“What do you want to play for then? And does this mean we’re wiping out what I owe you?” Arthie asked, keeping them from some fucking theological discourse that Ruth would be sure to have opinions about.

“Fat chance,” Sam grinned. “But as to the stakes, I’m open to suggestions.”

“Chores,” Debbie said promptly.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Alcohol,” Justine said, like she was fooling anyone.

“You’re seventeen and I’m on the wagon,” Sam said. “Arthie can’t hold her liquor and Ruth only likes fucking crème de menthe and pinot grigio spritzers. And we don’t have enough to get Carmen or Kurt drunk.”

“What about me?” Debbie said.

“Majority rules, sweetheart. It’s still a democracy around here,” Sam said. If he were being honest, he fucking luxuriated in shutting her down. She generally took it, which made it worth his while.

“Is it, though?” she snapped. He glanced at Ruth, who shrugged; he didn’t know if Debbie meant the house or the US government, but all he’d wanted to do was raise the stakes of a fucking poker game, not grapple with existential angst or passive-aggressive jockeying for dominance in a white clapboard house that could really have used a second bathroom. At least a half-bath—or a toilet in the cellar. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Anyone else have an idea?”

“Food. Stuff we get on raids. Good stuff, not like that vegetable stew, no offense, Arthie,” Carmen said.

“Is that safe?” Ruth said.

“It’s like a raincheck, whenever we can get it. Categories maybe—chocolate or chips, cheese, candy,” Carmen said.

“Or other luxuries. A nice sweater, not made of wool. A real teapot. Two-ply brand-name toilet paper,” Debbie said. 

“Liquid dish-soap.”

“Heinz ketchup.”

“Chili powder.” That was Kurt, who’d been saying he could make a mind-blowing chili if they only had the ingredients and what had happened to all the ground beef? No one wanted to say, _Fucking zombies, Kurt_ , because he was so nice and good at unscrewing caps and he’d play with Randy for hours.

“Tampons--” That was his daughter, of course. 

“Stop!” Sam called out.

“What?”

“This is getting fucking pathetic. Let’s stick with regular luxuries, chocolate, junk food. No household cleaners and shit,” Sam said. “Nothing that belongs in a bathroom or under the sink and yes, I’ll make an exception for bubble bath, Arthie.”

“The Guttmachers out on Old Lincoln Highway had family in Switzerland and they always got chocolates from them at the holidays,” Ruth said. 

“Lindt?” asked Debbie, with all the intensity of a woman who’d been stuck with Charleston Chews for a month.

“Toblerone,” Ruth answered. 

“I thought I liked blackjack better,” Sam said, remembering that day in Vegas, how happy they’d been. How the time had flown, his hand on her shoulder, the expression on her face when she looked up at him. He closed his eyes to savor the taste of honey and almond, chocolate and nougat on Ruth’s lips. She’d cleaned up in the last hand and had taken her winnings from the Guttmachers’ hoard. “But poker’s not fucking bad.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Toblerone is a Swiss chocolate bar brand owned by US confectionery company Mondelēz International, Inc., formerly Kraft Foods. Kraft acquired Toblerone from owner Jacobs Suchard in 1990. It is produced in Bern, Switzerland and the bear symbol of the city is depicted in the logo. Toblerone is known for its distinctive shape, a series of joined triangular prisms.
> 
> While garish sexuality was practically a guaranteed seller of scents in the ’80s, unabashed status was its own powerful market force. And nothing said status like Giorgio. Bearing the name and signature yellow-and-white stripes of one of Beverly Hills’ most exclusive boutiques, the strong, sweet, and instantly distinguishable floral smell of Giorgio could be yours at only $150 an ounce. And the brand didn’t even have to pay for celebrity endorsement. Giorgio boutique owner Fred Hayman told the New York Times that, as soon as the perfume launched, Hollywood “tastesetters” began wearing it and telling others about it. The newspaper pointed out in the same 1986 story that the perfume was now everywhere: “Farrah Fawcett wears it, Jacqueline Bisset wears it, even Michael Jackson wears it. It has become so recognizable that doormen and cab drivers have been known to call out ‘Giorgio’ when women wearing it walk by.”


	15. Chapter 15

Another bitterly cold day, too cold to snow, according to Ruth. The sky was an even pale blue and it was hard to shake the feeling of living under a dome. Of being trapped despite the unfurled, undisturbed white fields extending in all directions from the farmhouse at the center. Maybe a dog would have helped, a friendly, protective collie or an old German shepherd, but they didn’t have a dog and it had been days since Bash had answered Debbie’s last call, Sam had started dreaming about Ragusa and its dusty, white cathedral, the heat and the scent of oranges. Incense. Maybe this was what happened to fucking saints. Maybe he should prepare to see the Virgin Mary pressing her face against the window instead of a zombie.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Ruth said. She was ostensibly writing something, which was why she had a stubby pencil perched over her left ear, but when she was really writing, or editing, it was hard to get her to come up for air. Let alone have the sort of aimless conversation she was starting.

“Wise up, Ruth. They’re not worth that fucking much,” he said. Turns out, he could be morose and abrasive without any drugs or booze. Being an asshole came naturally to him.

“Come on,” she said. She’d never been easily derailed and now that they were together, albeit without any formal designation (he was too fucking old to be anyone’s boyfriend, she was too much more than his lover, and he couldn’t bring himself to even fucking mention marriage because what could that even mean now and where would he find a ring that fit?), now there was nothing holding her back. 

“Skies are probably blue in LA now,” he said. “No more traffic. No more smog.”

“D’you miss it?” she said. It was a stupid fucking question and she’d known he needed to be asked.

“It was home,” he said. “Did you miss it here when you were in LA?”

“A little. I didn’t want to though,” she said. “I’d spent so much time dreaming of getting out of here. Going out into the real world.”

“Seems goddamn real enough here to me,” he said.

“Why don’t you want to talk about LA?” 

He almost said _Why don’t you want to talk about your parents?_ but stopped himself. It was one of those days when he could barely convince himself she’d ever been Zoya, her hair teased into that crazy quiff, her eyes dark with kohl and mascara, that fucking prancing she did to get into the ring. She looked like a substitute English teacher in a lumpy, hand-knit sweater, one who ignored the regular lesson plan and had the kids read scenes aloud from modern plays the school board would never approve for the curriculum.

“Because I’m lucky,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“I got out. With Justine. You’re here,” he said. “I was even able to bring my screenplay, my Noni’s rosary. I have everything. All those poor fuckers back in LA are screwed, all those people I envied and loathed and despised and the ones who were better than me. They’re all dead or worse and there’s a beautiful clear blue sky and no traffic getting to the beach.”

“Oh, Sam,” she said. “I wish—”

“I don’t. I don’t wish anymore. I know I’m a lucky sonuvabitch and I’m working on the gratitude. It’s just hard. This is a hard place, isn’t it?”

Ruth had gotten up as he spoke, walking over to lean against him, one arm around his waist. The little pencil over her ear was jabbing into his shoulder, where they’d get vaccinated maybe. If Bash ever called back. If it ever warmed up enough to snow.


	16. Chapter 16

“I don’t want a birthday party,” Justine said. “I’m not nine.”

“What was your party like when you were nine?” Ruth asked. 

“Like a nine year old’s. Balloons, ice cream cake, playing some games in the backyard. Opening the presents in front of everyone and having to pretend I was excited about a lot of crap,” Justine said. “Justin, my older little brother, was like nearly two. He was scared of the balloons.”

“What did you want?” Carmen asked. Sam was glad because he wanted to know but it was still hard to ask Justine questions about the childhood he’d been completely unaware of.

“Um, let me think,” she said, scrunching up her forehead in a way an older woman would have avoided. Debbie most certainly did. “A bike, a new one, but it was too expensive. I got a bunch of Barbies and shit and I spent the next week cutting their hair, painting them with nail polish. My mom was so mad.”

Nine. That would have been ’79, he’d been doing well then. There was plenty of money for hotels, women, as much blow as he wanted. He’d spent a few weeks on vacation in Ixtapa until he couldn’t stand the other tourists. He’d driven a new Cadillac and sent an ostentatious gift basket to his mother when he didn’t make it home for Christmas. Sam had to give the fucking universe credit for finding an entirely new way for him to feel guilty for being a loser fuck-up deadbeat father, even though Rosalie had some skin in the game for never telling him about his kid.

“Did you like the ice cream cake?” Ruth asked. Sam, even through his overlay of guilt, could make out what she was angling after but then, he’d always found Ruth easy to read.

“Not really. It tasted like nothing, just cold and sweet. Not even chocolate really, like whatever flavor they use when they calls something chocolatey, like that’s a thing,” Justine said.

“It wouldn’t have to be a regular party,” Ruth said. “I mean, it couldn’t be. But you only turn eighteen once and we can do something—I can make a coffee cake and we have enough coffee and cocoa for everyone to have a mug, even if there’s no whipped cream. We can light a candle and sing Happy Birthday and I bet we could have a pretty fun game of Twister.”

“Ruth, I said I don’t need a party,” Justine said, acting like she was tired of repeating herself when she hadn’t. Actually. She’d said want first and now need and maybe not everyone was going to pick up on it, but Ruth had and Sam did.

“Not everything is about need,” Sam said, knowing Ruth would box Justine in with her follow-up and not wanting to say anything dickish to his daughter. For a change, Justine would probably remark.

“The party isn’t just for you, you know,” Ruth said. She didn’t shrug, she wasn’t much of a shrugger, Ruth, but she made her equivalent gesture, one she couldn’t have learned in a movement class but only from Gretchen-who-showed-no-signs-of-arriving. There was something pure Nebraska, pure Sunday School and casserole potluck and everyone pitching in at the haying about it (mentally, Sam shrugged, because he was a fucking shrugger, and admitted that he’d maybe been a little heavy-handed with the haying imagery but for a mainstream movie, Weir’s Witness had been pretty fucking well-made and the Amish shit was resonating like hell.) 

“What?”

“You may be the birthday girl,” Ruth said, pointedly ignoring Justine’s eye-roll, “but we can all use a little celebration, something to look forward to, plan for—”

“To break up the fucking monotony,” Sam said. “Not all of us are excited about planning.”

He knew he said that because he had no idea what to give Justine as a gift. But it was in character, so no one else would challenge him.

“I’ll make the cake,” Ruth said.

“I’ll decorate,” Debbie offered. “As long as Ruth is willing for me to rummage through the attic.”

“Of course,” Ruth answered, as if she hadn’t been obviously territorial about the attic almost exclusively in regards to Debbie. 

“Arthie and I can figure out some games. And Kurt will keep Randy out of everyone’s hair,” Carmen said. Kurt, a man of few words, nodded. He was probably the most restful person Sam could imagine to be essentially locked up with for an indeterminate period of time; it wasn’t necessarily good for the younger man that he refused to talk about what had happened on the trip to Nebraska but Sam didn’t need more details to pepper his subconscious with when it came to nightmares in which Ruth and Justine were both being attacked in front of him, both calling for him. He’d stopped telling Ruth about them but he’d also stopped complaining about being a grown-ass man sleeping in a twin bed. Waking up to her even breathing and matching his to hers had become the only way to get through a night unless she fucked him into a depth of unconsciousness dreams couldn’t breach. 

“Then it’s all settled,” Ruth said. “Right, Justine?”

“I guess. Fine. Okay,” she replied. “Whatever.”

The party didn’t actually make a difference. Sam would have needed to do something by way of a gift for Justine’s birthday and the fact that the first one he’d ever celebrated with her happened to be during a fucking apocalypse wasn’t going to count as an excuse; if anything, he was even more on the hook for a meaningful gift as there was a decent chance he was her only surviving parent and none of them were guaranteed to make it to her next birthday. He told himself, maybe the apocalypse didn’t make it that much harder—if they’d been back in LA, he would have had endless choices and he probably would have fucked up and made the wrong one, getting her a leather jacket she didn’t need, some piece of jewelry she sneered at, God forbid, a fucking scarf or book. 

The fucking hive of industry the farmhouse had become didn’t make it any easier. Ruth was writing and re-writing recipes down to the pinch, which was evidently a goddamn unit of measurement in baking and Debbie was sewing like she was the cursed princess in a fairy tale. Carmen was slightly more relaxed about the party activities but Arthie was all abuzz, clearly thrilled to be able to come up with ideas that weren’t being shot down or co-opted by the biddies.  
Randy was doing his usual Randy crap with Kurt but he was less snivelly with the additional attention and the general burbling cheer in the house. Sam felt very mildly guilty for not considering how tough it was for the little boy but Debbie had complained so frequently about the burdens of motherhood it had been hard to judge Randy as anything other than a perpetually wet and reeking millstone. The guilt about Randy made a pleasant change from the grinding feeling he had about Justine’s entire life except for the period of months that began a few weeks after he’d made a pass at her until the day before they fled LA.

“You’ll feel better if you say something,” Ruth fucking murmured, making sure he’d have to listen to what she said. It was dark, sometime after 9 pm and impossible to say otherwise. The twin bed left little room for tossing and turning, so it was pretty easy for her to tell when he couldn’t fall asleep.

“The fuck I will,” he said. He said it in a normal voice, the same volume he would have used in the kitchen, and it almost seemed like he was shouting. Maybe she winced, he couldn’t see, but he felt her shoulders tense, just a little. “Sorry.”

He wouldn’t have apologized to another woman, in another life. He didn’t deserve credit for it, even if he knew she’d give it.

“It’s her birthday,” he said. “A present. I’m going to fuck it up.”

“But, Sam, you can’t,” Ruth said and he knew she was trying to reassure him.

“You’d be surprised,” he said. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. Is this where you go all Pollyanna and tell me any gift I give her will be the perfect one because it’s from me.”

“I mean, I would have tried not to sound pedantic,” Ruth said tartly. “But the general gist, yeah, that would have been the meat of the argument. Since you’re determined to have one.”

“I’m an asshole, I know,” he said. “I’d like to not be one for once with her birthday.”

“First of all, pardon my French, but Justine’s kind of an asshole too. I mean, that’s one of her things, being an asshole—it’s one of the ways she manifests her essential Sylvia-ness,” Ruth said, making him smile. “She’ll want you to keep on being an asshole. Otherwise it’ll be weird.”

“Oddly consoling,” Sam said.

“Well, the truth often is. And I also feel fairly confident you have something in mind to give her and you’re just not sure she’ll like it. Or want it or get why you want to give it to her,” Ruth said, shifting around so she could look at him and let one hand rest lightly on his chest.

“Jesus.”

“You don’t have to tell me, it can be a big secret—”

“My noni Pasqualina’s rosary,” Sam interrupted. “The last thing anyone would’ve expected Sam the sinner to take with him from LA.” He’d wrapped it around his wrist during the drive from LA, hiding it beneath the cuff of his leather jacket. Feeling it, the smoothness of the beads, the weight of them, had calmed him more than he could have imagined.

“Do you really think anyone’s ever thought of you that way? And the alliteration isn’t very you,” Ruth said, possibly inspired, as her hand was drifting south in a way any sinner would know and welcome. He moved to return the favor so to speak and she shifted away slightly.

“This is just for you, tonight,” she said, slipping her palm beneath the waistband of the pajama bottoms he wore and stroking him. “You need a little TLC.”

“That’s what you’re calling it?” he asked. It was hard to be glib when she was so goddamn good at what she was doing. 

“Yeah,” she said. “She’ll need some context, you should write something. About your grandmother.”

“Fuck, Ruth, can you not talk about my daughter and my noni while you’re jerking me off? It’s a real mood-killer,” he muttered, because he was supposed to say something like that. Her hand kept moving steadily and it wasn’t like he hadn’t gotten hard as a fucking rock as soon as she’d grasped him.

“Fine. You’ll thank me later,” she said, kissing the underside of his jaw, pressing her breasts against him. He made a low sound that could arguably be called a grunt, except that made him sound like a dirty old man and he didn’t need any more shit to feel guilty about tonight. There was no confession to be made except into the darkness of Ruth’s loose hair, no absolution granted except her satisfied hum when he came. He woke up at 4 am when it was very quiet and cold and started writing while she slept beside him.

_My noni, Pasqualina Catalano Sylvia was born in Ragusa, Sicily in 1870, the ninth child and seventh daughter of Orazio Catalano…_


	17. Chapter 17

For all that Justine was trying to look like she wanted to stab them with her eyes, she couldn’t hide the smile on her face. It kept sneaking out—when she’d first seen the hand-sewn streamers Debbie had hung from every ceiling joist and the bouquet of fabric flowers she’d made as a centerpiece for the kitchen table, when Ruth walked in with a coffee-cake covered in ice-cream sprinkles, carrying it as solemnly as if she had fucking John the Baptist’s head on a platter, and most definitely when Sam took his turn in the game of themed charades that Arthie and Carmen had cooked up, failing to convince anyone of anything except that he was a piss-poor actor even when almost nothing was required of him. Later, he’d probably complain to Ruth _I wasn’t even fucking trying_ and she’d pat him kindly on the shoulder and say some BS like _we can’t all do everything_ but then turn the patting into cupping his whiskery cheek and he’d have come out ahead. Again. He wouldn’t have pegged himself for someone who’d do especially well during a zombie apocalypse but it was something to offset the perpetual sense of dread he carried with him.

He was hoping he’d get another smile from Justine when she opened the present he had for her, but he wasn’t counting on it. His luck was due to run dry right around that point.

“For she’s a jolly good fellll-ow, for she’s a jolly good fellll-ow,” they were singing now, in lieu of the other birthday song option, which they’d discarded when it was clear it would be off-key six ways from Sunday. There is was again, that smile on Justine’s face and Ruth glancing at him happily, Kurt and Carmen and Arthie with their arms slung around each other. Even Debbie had Randy on her hip, joggling him a little, pointing out the lit candle, telling him what a good boy he was, how big and if he just waited a minute, he’d get a big piece of Aunt Ruthie’s cake.

Turned out, he had to wait a lot longer than a minute, because the song broke off as they all heard the thrumming sound of an airplane low enough to be a crop-duster, as if anyone would fucking dust crops in the dead of winter. It suddenly occurred to Sam maybe this was the goddamn cavalry coming in with supplies or some kind of airborne treatment to eradicate zombies and he looked at Ruth, seeing the thought cross her mind as well as her eyes lit up.

“Finally,” he muttered. The candle on the cake burned unnoticed as they all crowded the windows that overlooked the back fields.

“Is that Bash?” Arthie asked.

“I don’t know,” Debbie said. “He was very Bash about the whole thing, it’ll be amazing, I’ll make it happen, yadda yadda, light on the actual details. I figured Rhonda would handle that part, to be honest.”

“What if we get real coffee for your birthday, Justine?” Carmen said.

“Or Swiss chocolate,” Ruth added. They’d burned through the Toblerone in under 48 hours. If the world ever got back to some version of normal, Sam was pretty set as far as last minute gift-giving.

“He better send garlic,” Sam said. “That’s non-negotiable.”

“That’s for vampires, not zombies,” Debbie said. “Mr. Horror-Movie-Auteur.”

“Fuck you, Debbie. I just want a meal that tastes like something other than Mrs. Fucking Dash,” Sam said, not bothering about Randy. Debbie didn’t either. The kid had positively marinated in obscenity by now, a few more fucks weren’t going to do anything.

“Do you think they’re going to land?” Kurt asked. “I mean, the visibility’s okay but there’s not a real runway or anything.”

“They’re getting pretty low,” Arthie said. Just then, the sky filled with white—not a sudden snow squall, which they’d all grown fairly used to, but paper. Thousands of pieces of paper, swirling and fluttering down over the frost-covered fields.

“What the hell is that?” Justine said.

“I’ll go check,” Kurt said. He was the most nimble of them, so it wasn’t like anyone was going to argue, and with any luck, some of the paper would drift close to the back door.

“It’s probably the government,” Debbie said. “Some sort of mass notification. Maybe about a vaccine. Or a safe harbor location.” For someone with literally no more information than the rest of them, she had a lot of fucking theories. It hadn’t looked like any kind of government aircraft, not that Sam was an expert, but he’d been around for a while, had had buddies who served.

“I grabbed a bunch, but I think they’re all the same,” Kurt said, dumping a handful of crumpled paper on the table. Ruth shifted the cake over to the side so it wouldn’t get smashed as they all reached to take up a page to study.

“This is bat-shit fucking crazy,” Sam muttered. “Not even Bash—”

“You don’t think these are from him?” Arthie said.

“Yeah, no, I don’t think Bash is part of some group proclaiming themselves the Trüe Cüre with a fucking umlaut over both u’s, some sort of Aryan-Nazi allusion—”

“And what does ‘prepare for consumption, for the renewal of the twelve skins’ possibly mean?” Ruth said.

“They look hand-printed,” Debbie said, pointing to a couple of different places on the page she held. “The ink is spattered in different patterns and the lines are crooked here and here.”

“I don’t feel good about this,” Justine said.

“Well, fuck, kiddo, I don’t think you’re supposed to, unless you’re another nutjob or a sheep wishing to be saved by some supreme overlord who’s going to, and this is a fucking weird choice of verbs, absquatulate the undead zombies and restore us to ‘a mighty man’s land of milk and myrrh.’ Whoever these fuckers are, they have no copy editor and no decent promotional department,” Sam said. “Happy birthday, Justine. We thought the zombies were bad but now we’ve got something else even worse—”

“Worse than zombies?” Carmen said. Sam glanced at Ruth and then Debbie, saw the look that went between the two women. Maybe a silver lining was they’d finally found a big enough common enemy to let their previous shit recede into the past for good—or what passed for it.

“A cult that wants to take over the country, yeah, that’s worse,” said Sam. “The zombies only want some company. Who wants cake?”

Maybe someone would have said _yes_ or Randy would have just grabbed a chunk and crammed it in his mouth, but there was a sudden roar, the airplane doubling back. Flying even lower than before, black smoke pouring out its tail and then it crashed into the windmill on the back ten acres, the one that had been keeping them in light and water. 

“Shit!” Sam yelled.

“Do you think anyone made it?” Arthie cried out.

A huge fireball explosion, brilliant yellow and orange like a cartoon come to life, prevented anyone from answering. 

“Not now,” Sam said. “Jesus, I guess we’ll never forget your birthday, Justine.”

**Author's Note:**

> Here it is, the zombie apocalypse roadtrip post-canon AU you never asked for!
> 
> The title is from John Dryden.


End file.
